Mark Friedman
Cofounder And Board Officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Friedman is a seasoned software leader and cofounder with 14 years of experience in technical leadership, spanning startups and tech giants like Google and Microsoft. He co-founded the App Inventor Foundation, scaling a visual programming platform to 15 million registered users and guiding its transition from an MIT research project to a global nonprofit. Hands-on across backend, DevOps and product engineering, he’s improved build systems and storage for notable open-source projects such as MIT App Inventor and has led engineering teams at Thunkable and Piper to deliver blocks-based educational tools. Passionate about edtech and social good, he combines academic ties as an MIT research affiliate and adjunct teaching experience with practical work mentoring and building platforms that make programming accessible to diverse learners. An unexpected thread through his career is a consistent focus on developer tooling and infrastructure that empowers nontraditional coders to create real impact.
14 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
B.A. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, B.A. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Vassar CollegeBronx High School of SciencePhD program Computer Science, PhD program Computer Science at Boston University
Stackoverflow
75reputation
6kreached
4answers
5questions
Github Skills (16)
javas10
java10
build-automation9
devops8
appengine7
blob-store7
blob-storage7
firebase-authentication6
google-cloud-platform6
blockly6
amazon-web-services6
android6
firebase6
google-app-engine6
appinventor6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
mit-cml/appinventor-sources
Nov 2011 - Apr 2022
MIT App Inventor Public Open Source
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:42 reviews, 9 commits, 2 PRs in 10 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily focused on enhancing the build server infrastructure, including increasing memory allocation for child processes and making it configurable via command-line arguments. They also made changes to support storing files, specifically blocks (.blk files), in Blobstore. Furthermore, the user adjusted the autoscrolling behavior in the Blockly editor. These modifications suggest a focus on improving the project's build process and storage mechanisms.
app-inventormit-app-inventorandroidmitinventor
mit-cml/lexical-variable-demo
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
Contributions:35 commits, 17 pushes, 4 branches in 3 months
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