Mark Ballew

I'm a Devops engineer that specializes in Security, though has the industry has evolved the past few months I've developed more and more skillsets and curiosity in the AI and LLM space.

The majority of my tech experience is in automation, with my largest scale projects being in the identity space handling millions of users, such as my work with Stormpath and Okta; they are huge identity providers that have a lot in intricate cryptography internals to security handle authentication to services across the web in real time.

Most of my programming experience is centered around Python, Ansible, and Terraform/Opentofu. For a few months I was learning Solana contracts and Typescript, but pivoted away from that when I found a full time Devops role. I am still interested in learning this space and also working with a team to develop an application or product during the hackathon.

I was also an early adopter of Bitcoin, contributing to early mining pools like Slush and trading on MtGox and Tradehill. After the first crash I left crypto, which of course was a regrettable decision.

Other skills I can use for a hackaton is that I am fairly good at 3d printing, and have built my own 3d printers such as Voron and rebuilt several Prusas. I'm familiar with the software, filaments, and can create objects to print in a few hours then scale up from there.

My current passion project I am contributing code to is a multi color filament slicer from Mosaic Manufacturing that has gone out of production so I am hacking it to build a community around it:

https://github.com/vhspace/p2pp

I am also very interested in home automation, and have a fairly complicated Home Assistant setup at home. I'd like to dig more into esp32 devices and figure out how to use those with web3 and home automation.

Finally, I'd like to see how web3 can be used for privacy, personalized AI recommendations like the Tiktok For You Page (the "algorithm"), and mobile app distribution that takes control of what can go in an app store away from governments and private companies