About StoneFrog

As a kid, I was always drawing: pictures, plans, maps. I watched my dad build things, and I built things too. I loved making, shaping, and figuring things out.

I eventually made it to college for sculpture, painting, and animation. After college, computers started as a side job, then turned into a thirty-year career in systems, network, and architecture-focused computer engineering. I was at the InterNIC when the internet's naming system was still being built.

The maker side never went away. I still build things the way a sculptor builds: by seeing the shape of something, working with the materials, solving problems, and adjusting as I go. Even when the thing I'm building is a music app.

Knots was a project I gave myself to better understand Kubernetes and dynamic cloud infrastructure. Like most of my projects, it came from a mix of experience, research, curiosity, and figuring things out as I went. That process is one of the things I love most.

The knot started as a drawing. I've always liked Celtic knotwork: lines with no clear beginning or end, constantly looping back, crossing over, and finding each other again. That turns out to be a lot like music. Every band connects to somebody's side project. Every producer worked with someone who worked with someone you've heard of. The lines keep going.

I've always liked frogs, and my last name is Stone. I registered stonefrog.com back when you did that by emailing the InterNIC, and I've held it ever since, waiting for the right thing to put on it.

This is the right thing.

Knots started as a practical project. I wanted to get better at Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, replication, regional failover, and the kind of systems work that matters in my day job. I needed a real problem to build around, not just another demo app.

Music made sense. I've always loved the way music connects people, places, bands, scenes, and eras. Once I started looking at MusicBrainz data, the structure was already there: artists, members, releases, producers, collaborations, side projects, aliases, labels, and histories. It was all connected. It just needed a better way to explore it.

The first version ran on one computer in my barn office. Then it grew. One database became more databases. One region became multiple regions. The app grew into a mirror, a search system, replication, backups, monitoring, native app ideas, and a lot more infrastructure than anyone would reasonably expect for a music discovery project.

The infrastructure is probably three times the size of the app you actually see. That part was not exactly the plan. In some ways, that part became the point.

Knots is a hobby that got out of hand.

For a while, the project was called InterCHORD. I liked the name because it carried the idea of music and connection. Then I found out Universal had filed for "InterCord" thirteen days earlier.

I lost. There was not much to argue.

So I came back to the things that had been there all along: the knot, the frog, the domain name, and the way I build things. StoneFrog made more sense anyway. It felt less like a product name someone invented in a meeting and more like something that had been waiting for the right use.

StoneFrog is not a big company. It is not really a company at all. It is just me.

There are no investors, no growth team, and no ad model. Your listening data is not for sale, and your curiosity is not something I want to package up and sell.

The fee helps cover the bills: servers, storage, databases, bandwidth, APIs, certificates, app store costs, and the other boring pieces that keep the thing running. It does not pay me a salary.

It is me, after work and on weekends, building something I wanted to exist.