Brisbane, Australia

Ben Marino
builds at the intersection.

Software engineer with 20+ years experience. Ultra runner who trains at 3:30am. Mental health advocate who's raised $10K+ for the Mental Health Foundation. Now combining all three — building AI tools for athlete mental performance.

MindsetCoach

Beta

Mental training app for runners and endurance athletes. Coaches gain visibility into the mental side of training — the invisible data that Strava and Garmin don't track. Think Strava for your mind.

.NET MAUI Blazor Hybrid SQLite AES-256 Semantic Kernel
mindsetcoach.app

Context Engineering Lab

Research

Stress-testing AI coaching reliability. Experiments on persona bias, attention blind spots, provider comparisons, and context compression trade-offs. Every run is reproducible with full receipts.

ASP.NET Core 8 Semantic Kernel OpenAI Claude Gemini DeepSeek
Coming soon

SociallyFed

In Development

Privacy-first AI platform built on the "Socially Fed Pyramid" framework from my Master's research. Multi-tenant architecture with professional services features.

Vue.js ASP.NET Core Google Cloud JWT
sociallyfed.com

StudySpy

Live

Education platform serving New Zealand Tertiary providers. 70,000+ monthly searches, 1.5 million daily visitors served to Tealium enrichment platform. Built and maintained as a solo developer.

.NET SQL Server SEO
studyspy.ac.nz
20+
Years Engineering
70K
Monthly Searches
$10K+
Raised for Mental Health
The Persona War: Same Data, Opposite Coaching
How AI coaching persona choice shapes athlete outcomes
LinkedIn · Feb 2026
The Dumb Zone: Where AI Stops Paying Attention
Testing the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon in AI coaching
LinkedIn · Feb 2026
Context Engineering Lab — Live Workshop
Interactive presentation on AI coaching reliability
Talk · Mar 2026
Digital Wellness & the Socially Fed Pyramid
Master's thesis — surveyed 136 participants on digital wellness and performance
Thesis · 2025

Running for Mental Health

Ultra-marathon runner and mental health advocate. Raised over $10,000 for the Mental Health Foundation through endurance events. Public speaker on the intersection of running, resilience, and mental wellbeing. 3:30am training sessions. Because the mind you build in the dark is the one that shows up on race day.

Senior Software Engineer — LinkSoft
Real-time fleet management systems. Vue.js frontends, ASP.NET Core APIs.
Current
Developer - StudySpy
Solo-built education platform. 70K+ monthly searches, 1.5M daily visitors.
Part-time
Database & Systems — Nielsen
13 years managing 50–200GB SQL Server databases. Legacy modernisation.
13 years
Master's — Technological Futures
Research on digital wellness, AI ethics, and the Socially Fed Pyramid framework.
Completed