John N. Mandalakas

Senior software engineer with more than ten years experience, specializing in real time systems. Mostly I build things with elixir/erlang and python, though I dabble with lots of different technologies.

I'm enthusiastic about distributism -- in software -- but also elsewhere. Perhaps most importantly at the root of the civilizational technology stack: agriculture. So when not writing code, I'm also an aspiring backyard farmer.

Prose

Conference Speaker
Spoke at Code BEAM America 2025 on how to apply lessons from building distributed systems onto the physical realms check it out
Plant Breeding
As part of my personal interest in reforming our food system, I have been breeding landrace crops since 2018. Occassionally these are available on my etsy store
Blog
Musings on various topics coming soon

Code

"LCARS"
Reimagining how software interfaces should work by leveraging economically efficient Small Language Models. Excited to share more details soon
Compost Connect
Once upon a time, this was a react-native app and web platform built with ruby and elixir that helped several thousand people in four cities compost their waste. It was subsumed into other software in 2020 but you can still check it out