David Pinkerton / Brisbane
My throughline: find the one expensive step in a business — the quote, the site visit, the manual check — and ship the tool that removes it. Four shipped products, a rack full of Proxmox, and a preference for software that still works in five years. Independent builder and fractional CIO, remote-first from Queensland.
Your story, woven together.
A collaborative book service. Invite the people who were there — they send text, voice recordings, and photos — and Claude weaves everything into a continuously evolving narrative that reads like a real book. Works for family histories, group trips, tributes, team seasons. Print-ready PDF export, passkey-first sign-in, adaptive international pricing. Built from scratch over 2025 as the culmination of the “books are the best interface we have for making sense of a life” instinct.
Laser-cut metal fabrication, priced in seconds.
Multi-supplier quoting platform for laser-cut metal fab. Customers upload DXF flat sheet, STEP, or NC1 tube files; the quoting engine parses geometry, prices the job, and takes Stripe payment. Orders route to suppliers with purchase orders, job data, and payout pricing. Includes a supplier portal for stock, pricing, and test-certificate management — with Claude-backed validation of cert PDFs.
Your normal Nostr usage is your proof of life.
Existing dead man's switches require you to remember to check in — the failure mode is triggering while you're alive but forgot. This one passively monitors your npub across relays. Posts, reactions, zaps — any signed event resets the timer. Go silent for X days and it DMs you a warning; still nothing and it triggers: emails, notes, webhooks, whatever you've configured. No check-in fatigue, cryptographic proof, all inside the protocol.
More open-source tools and side projects in Labs →
Former CyberCX security consultant, 2 years as infrastructure CIO, now building a handful of products and consulting a few engagements at a time. I prefer self-hosted, open-source, and done properly — systems that are yours when the SaaS bill arrives or the acquirer pulls the plug.
When I'm not shipping product, I take on a small number of infrastructure and AI-automation engagements — typically as a fractional CIO or a scoped build.
Monthly retainer for infrastructure strategy, security posture, and hands-on delivery. From ~15 hours/month.
Proxmox clusters, ZFS, backups, Tailscale, reverse proxies, Ansible. Scoped projects in 2–6 weeks.
Claude-backed document pipelines, lead-capture flows, voice-to-content systems. Self-hosted where possible.
Essential Eight, ISO 27001, NIST CSF. Wazuh SIEM, authentication hardening, passkeys.
BTCPay, Lightning nodes, Electrs, multisig verification. Someone who runs these in production.
Architecture reviews, vendor evaluation, disaster-recovery readiness. Short, specific, written up.
For case studies and a fuller breakdown, see dpinkerton.com/services.
If something here sparked a thought — a collaboration, a build, or just a chat about any of this — the inbox is open.