Hello World
Hey there! I'm Mark Repka, a Software Engineer based in Rochester, NY. I figured the best way to kick things off would be to introduce myself and share a bit about what I'm working on.
A Bit About Me
I graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2016 with a BS in Computer Science. During my time at RIT I was an active member and e-board member of RITlug, the RIT Linux Users Group, where I helped foster a community around Linux and open source software.
These days I work at Bitovi as a Software Engineer and JavaScript Consultant on the Systems Engineering team. Before Bitovi, I was a Software Engineer at Kodak Alaris working on the Kodak Moments web platform.
What I Work With
My primary focus is backend development with Node.js and TypeScript, but over the years I've picked up a broad toolkit. Here's a snapshot:
- Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash, C#, Java, C/C++
- Backend & APIs: Express, Restify, Koa, Hono, GraphQL
- AI/LLM: OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Ollama, AWS Bedrock, LangChain, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A)
- Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, NGINX, Linux server administration
- Cloud: Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, Supabase
- Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, SQLite
- Workflow: Temporalio
- Frontend: React, Redux
I'm also a long-time Linux enthusiast. I've been running Linux on all of my personal machines since around 2009, generally Debian-based systems.
Projects
Outside of work, I like to tinker on side projects. A few highlights:
- Hennos: A Telegram chat bot powered by large language models (OpenAI, Anthropic) that works in both one-on-one and group chat settings. This one has been a great playground for exploring AI tooling in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.
- TeleIRC: A Go implementation of a Telegram-to-IRC bridge, originally built for the RITlug community. It's been starred over 150 times on GitHub and is used by groups around the world.
- Project Lifeforce: A set of TypeScript REST APIs that power my various apps, websites, and services, providing server status, logging, and utilities.
You can find all of my open source work on GitHub.
What to Expect Here
I'm planning to use this blog to write about things I'm building, problems I've solved, and topics in software engineering that I find interesting, especially around backend development, AI tooling, and self-hosting. If any of that sounds interesting, stick around!