During 2025, Mako can be reached at Mako.Bates@uvm.edu.
On Github he is ShapeOfMatter.
He’s somewhat active on StackExchange.
Academic¶
Mako Bates is a PhD candidate
at the University of Vermont;
he’ll be defending his thesis on choreographic programming in June of 2025.
He’s also studying secure multi-party computation, differential privacy systems, and language design.
University of Vermont
Graduate Research Assistant
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science, type-theory, applied cryptography
2020 – current
University of Southern Maine
Bachelor’s in Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering
2010 – 2014
Links¶
Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming.
with Shun Kashiwa, Syed Jafri, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, and Joseph Near,
accepted to PLDI25.
arXiv:2412.02107 [cs.PL]
MultiChor: Type-safe and efficient choreographies with location-set polymorphism.
A Haskell package available on Hackage.
We Know I Know You Know; Choreographic Programming With Multicast and Multiply Located Values.
with Joeseph Near,
CP24 Workshop, 2024, Copenhagen.
YouTube
Industry¶
He put the 402-Receipts Standard on indefinite hiatus in 2019.
Of that work, the piece mostly likely to still be of any use is the RSA Blind Signature implementation.
Mako built a deep understanding of php and python during his six years of industry work; this inspired his decision to return to academia.
Blackhawk Network
Senior Developer, 2020-2020
- Backend engineer in a large network of teams maintaining a family of late-startup-scale Django apps.
- Introduced and implemented Mypy static type analysis on new and existing repositories.
- Added to and simplified the team’s use of Django middle-ware patterns.
Irving Street Functionality LLC
Consultant, 2019-2020
- Helped clients understand the costs and benefits of different tech stacks.
- Researched and advised on the utility of different cryptocurrency systems.
- Designed and built e-commerce, customer-outreach, and inventory-searching tools for a small retailer with low technical expertise.
The Direct Monetization Network
Founder, 2018 – 2019
- Designed a standardized web protocol for low-interaction paywalls on any tech-stack.
- Published open-source C++ implementation of core cryptographic protocol.
- Built proof-of-concept Notary app in Haskell (Scotty, hasql, PostgreSQL).
Tilson Technology Management
Lead Engineer, 2015 – 2019
- Full stack engineer responsible for design, development, QA/QC and maintenance of a high traffic e-commerce web application in AWS.
- Managed the migration from a single persistent designated server
to a load-balanced, auto-deployed, auto-scaling AWS setup with CDN and other peripherals.
- Updated database schema and settings to meet performance requirements.
- Built server-initialization scripts and transaction-report utilities in Python and Bash.
- Managed the migration from PHP-5.3 to 7.2.
- Monitored and addressed performance, reliability, and security issues.
- Designed and built asynchronous-processing systems and other site peripherals.
- Built integrations with mobile and set-top apps to provide a cross-device UX.
- Built integrations with 10+ third-party service providers.
Ecolab
Software Developer, 2014 – 2015
- Full-stack iterative development of an existing enterprise C# .NET application.
- Added functionality to an expert-system resource-scheduling system with reporting, asynchronous data processing, SAP ERP integrations,
and a JS front-end.
- Participated in systematic automated testing, unit-testing, manual testing and code review.