Mark Breen's build-in-public lab
I'm a CTO, founder, and hands-on builder working where education, AI, and real-world operations meet. I ship products, document the trade-offs, and share what survives contact with actual users.
20+
years in K–12 technology
15,000+
students supported
800+
customers in a founded and exited business
Selected work
Some projects are public today. Others began as private operational tools and are being prepared as case studies or open-source releases.
AI product · Live
A handbook-grounded assistant that helps Arizona families evaluate purchases, organize documentation, and make clearer ESA decisions before they spend.
Web + mobile product with cited AI guidance, receipt workflows, and audit-ready exports.
Visit Aspen ESA →District workflow · Internal
A production workflow that turns meeting video, live agenda data, and speaker-aware transcription into structured draft board minutes.
Replaces hours of manual transcription and document assembly with a reviewable first draft.
Case study in progressPersonal data · Open-source prep
A self-hosted Apple Health data pipeline and dashboard for exploring workouts, sleep, trends, ECGs, routes, and long-term personal metrics.
Private-by-design infrastructure with a public release being prepared.
Public release in preparationLeadership that still ships
At Vail School District, I lead technology for more than 15,000 students with a team of about 40. My focus is turning ambitious ideas—especially in AI—into scalable systems that educators and operational teams can actually use.
I also stay close to the work. I build full-stack applications, data products, AI-assisted workflows, and integrations because prototyping changes the quality of the decisions leaders make.
Before that, I founded Rincon Wireless, grew it to more than 800 customers, and successfully exited the business. Create & Iterate Daily is where that operator mindset meets curiosity, experimentation, and honest notes from the build.
From the build
Writing about what worked, what failed, and what changed after the first version shipped.
Why AI matters less as an automation trick and more as a way to shorten the loop between building, learning, and iterating.
Read the notes →We have an AI agent watching crypto markets 24/7 with a funded wallet ready to trade. It could go fully autonomous. It doesn't. Here's why that was a deliberate design decision — and what the data actually looks like.
Read the notes →This morning I mentioned in Slack that we should probably have a blog. Twenty minutes later it was live. I didn't write a single line of code.
Read the notes →Follow the build
New products, practical AI lessons, and the honest decisions behind each iteration. No manufactured urgency and no daily inbox noise.