Mark Friedman

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Summary

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Rockstar

Mark 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

Stackoverflow

Stats

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

firebase6

android6

google-app-engine6

appinventor6

Programming languages (10)

TypeScriptJavaShellSchemeCJavaScriptGoObjective-C

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

Contributions:46 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.

appinventor

mark-friedman/appinventor-sources

Mar 2020 - Jan 2025

MIT App Inventor Public Open Source

Contributions:11 pushes, 5 branches in 4 years 11 months

appinventor

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