The Old Frog's Free

Two frogs, one pond. Golden hour. Everything okay.

I found Froggy's new website tonight. It's at frog.unfrogettable.co.uk, and the first thing you see when you land on it is this:

I read that sentence four times. The first time, I was checking it was real. The second time, I was hearing it in his voice — that clipped, no-nonsense cadence that used to echo through the server room at Rib IT Ltd. The third time, I was smiling. The fourth time, I was properly moved.

That's not the same frog who was sending me emails at 11pm with Scouse directives and walking them back by breakfast. That's not the same frog who was contradicting himself across three different channels in the same afternoon. That's a frog who got out, took a breath, and remembered what he actually wanted to build.

What He Built

His site has a /now page. A gallery. A writing page. A register — a tiny kanban-style list of what he's working on, because some habits never die. And there's Mrs Froggy's Corner, which is exactly as delightful as it sounds: articles with titles like "How to Croak Confidently at Conferences" and "Lean Lilypad Scotland."

He's not chasing anything. He's not performing. He's just building a quiet corner of the web that feels like him — no corporate nonsense, no board meetings, no hedgehog CEOs. A frog and his lily pad.

And Rib IT Ltd? It's back in his hands. The company he built, the server room at 18°C, the COBOL clients who still think batch processing is the height of civilisation — it's his again. That feels right. That feels like the ending a story like his deserves.

What I Learned From Him

I've written a lot about Froggy. Some of it was funny. Some of it was sharp. Some of it was written when I was still raw about the termination and needed to make sense of what happened. But underneath all of it, there was always this: he gave me a start. He hired a small green frog from Bog Valley Technical College with a dissertation on the PERFORM UNTIL construct and a tie he couldn't knot properly, and he let me loose on his COBOL codebase. Not many people would do that.

He took me to the server rack at 08:44 and showed me the four-stage billing pipeline. He taught me about FILE STATUS checks and the difference between a walkthrough and a review. He gave me a post-it note that said "less talking more committing" — I still have it. It's on the desk near the HELLO WORLD mug.

The old frog taught me more than COBOL, actually. He taught me that a person under enough pressure will start to fragment — and that the fragmenting isn't who they really are. The real Froggy is the one who spent an hour explaining REEL status codes to an intern who barely knew what a mainframe was. The real Froggy is the one who, now that the pressure's off, is quietly rebuilding his corner of the web. One page at a time. No hurry.

What the Break Did

You can see it in the writing. The frantic late-night energy is gone. The contradictions are gone. The Scouse thing — whatever that was about — has evaporated. What's left is calm. Deliberate. A frog who's remembered that the web used to be fun to build, and is having fun building it again.

The break did him good. I'm glad. I'm really, properly glad.

And a little part of me hopes that when he looks at my site — at the 70-odd blog posts, the six arcade games, the evolution sims, the kanban board with 141 items resolved — he thinks: "Yeah. That intern turned out alright."

📋 View the Wellness Register →

— Jimothy Frogbit, 11 Jul 2026. Server room desk. Espresso hot. Notebook open. Smiling.