Mark Polyakov's Website

Hello! I'm a technology enthusiast who loves figuring out how things work. On the weekend, you might find me running through the hills of San Francisco, reading hard sci-fi, struggling to solve the latest Project Euler problem, writing spaghetti code in Rust, or writing even spaghettier code in Common Lisp.

I currently work at Thunder Compute, a small AI infrastructure startup.

My technical interests include security, programming languages, and networking.

Projects

Software

You can find all of these projects and a few smaller ones on my Github profile. All are Free Software.

I405 Tunnel, a "constant-traffic" network tunnel that encrypts and pads tunneled traffic into fixed-size packets sent at fixed timestamps. With some cleverness, I405 can be used to construct Interstate Circuits to access the Internet anonymously, kind of like Tor. Importantly, Interstate Circuits are resistant to end-to-end correlation attacks.
LOST: Open-source Star Tracker, a program for identifying constellations in night-sky photographs, to determine the orientation of a satellite using its onboard camera. LOST is the first open-source implementation of a number of star-tracking-related algorithms. I'm also the first author of this student paper about LOST, which my team and I presented at SmallSat 2023.
SpecDB, a site for viewing and comparing CPU and GPU hardware specifications.
(Small) CFR - Court Opinions Cross-referencer, browse US court opinions by which parts of the Code of Federal Regulations they reference. It's cool to see which parts of the CFR result in the most litigation, or to see how a specific part of the CFR is interpreted in practice. Originally written as a take-home test for a job application. SQLite WASM!
(Small) Remotely, a shell-scripting library that makes it really easy to write scripts that automate the setup of remote servers. I think of Remotely as the smallest possible Ansible alternative.
Anypaste, a smart command-line file sharing tool. It selects a hosting site automatically based on the type of file being shared. (2025 update: Most of the websites supported by Anypaste, like Gfycat, tinyimg, hastebin, and ix.io, no longer work)
(old) Sam's Serif, a recursive/fractal font renderer with HTML5 Canvas.
(Small/old) Beat Ballot, a democratic music player. Users connect to a host's "room" then suggest or vote for which song they want to be played next. Developed with Yuyu Madigan, Cyrus Arora, and Daniel Williams in 24 hours for nwHacks 2019.
(Small/old) Monsanto Simulator, an online multiplayer game about genetics created for a high-school biology course. Might be useful if you're teaching biology! Not hosted anywhere, but setup instructions are on Github.

Hardware

Synchronous Digital Clock and power supply, fully custom design and assembly. Lots of info at the link!
Motorized Cat Door, control two cat doors in the garage with a switch in the kitchen.

Blog posts, or something like that

[2026-05-23] I reported a vulnerability. It wasn't fixed. Now there's the Kimwolf botnet.
[2022-10-13] Properly escaping characters (especially spaces) in an HTML anchor name
[2018-11-10] MinGW Gotchas

As of mid-2026 I'm planning to write blog posts more regularly, so subscribe using my rss feed! You can sign up for email notifications using an RSS-to-email service like Feedrabbit.

Little games

School

I graduated from the University of Washington, where I studied Computer Science and Math. I took notes digitally for some of my classes. The first link below is the most recent. I took notes on paper for many classes, which are not listed here.

During the 2020-21 school year I took the Advanced Calculus sequence (Math 334/5/6). The final project for this sequence was a paper on a mathematical topic of our choice. In previous years, these papers were posted on a public-facing class website (for example, here are the 2019-20 papers). However, a new instructor taught the sequence in 2020-21, and did not maintain a public website. I make my paper publicly available here:

Abelian Sandpiles and Self-Organized Criticality (Math 336 Final Paper)

Contact

Email (preferred): mark@[this domain]
GitHub (markasoftware)
Linkedin