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.

CurrentlySenior Software Engineer at LinkSoft. Architecture and API lead on a .NET 10 modernisation.

In the build — 9 weeks to Guzzler
Body and codebase, both training.

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. Built on the Socially Fed Pyramid framework from my Master's research.

.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

StudySpy

Live

Education platform serving New Zealand Tertiary providers. 70,000+ monthly searches, 1.5 million daily visitors served to Tealium enrichment platform.

.NET SQL Server SEO
studyspy.ac.nz
20+
Years Engineering
1.5M
Daily Visitors
$10K+
Raised for Mental Health
Two Machines, Three Tiers
The architecture behind a race-day fuel chart: frontier reasoning where it matters, local extraction where it doesn't
Architecture Notes · May 2026
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
Talk at AI & Society Brisbane on stress-testing 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
All writing →

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
Tech Lead - StudySpy
Education platform, 70k+ monthly searches
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