Mason McBride

About

Backend engineer who built gnocal, a ~150-line stateless Go service that turns on-chain event data into standards-compliant .ics calendar feeds consumable by Apple/Google Calendar, deployed on Fly.io. Also refactored MCTS into Monte Carlo Graph Search (Python-to-Rust) using deterministic tests and state canonicalization to handle transpositions, and implemented decentralized role-based ACLs in Gno for a smart-contract web hosting network (gno.land / All in Bits).

Key Strengths

• Designed an end-to-end stateless backend translating on-chain events into RFC 5545 .ics feeds for Apple/Google Calendar
• Strong bias for simplicity and correctness (no caching/persistence to avoid sync bugs; fail-fast boundary validation)
• API contract-first mindset (strict schemas, consistent errors, cursor pagination, accurate OpenAPI for frontend enablement)
• Security through least-privilege design (scoped auth, strict validation, intentional CORS, rate limits, parameterized queries)
• Led a high-risk refactor with parallel run and deterministic equivalence tests (Python validation then Rust port)
• Identified and fixed subtle algorithmic edge case (transpositions) by canonicalizing states to improve robustness and performance

Experience

Education

Awards

• UC Berkeley Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarship
• AFRL Scholar
• Diamond rank on tank role in Overwatch 2

Skills

Languages

Publications

1 publication