About

I’m Aaron K. Clark — CryptoJones online. A Principal Software Engineer / Architect with 25+ years spanning .NET/backend development, AI-agent infrastructure, cloud, and security, and a USMC veteran. Right now I’m Principal Software Architect & ML Engineer (contract) at Ronin 48, building production AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and ML pipelines. Deep C#/.NET and Python, with a long habit of clear technical writing and developer enablement.

The road here runs from NASA’s Johnson Space Center and a Marine Corps network-operations billet through Rackspace, CrowdStrike, and Black Hills Information Security — a lot of years spent making other people’s infrastructure behave.

Things I’ve built

Open-source, mostly security- and agent-flavored:

  • KaliMCP & PerplexityAgent — security-hardened MCP servers exposing, respectively, a curated subset of Kali Linux tools and the Perplexity Search/Sonar APIs to AI agents (refuse-list guards + audit logging, hardened to NSA MCP guidance).
  • omind — persistent-memory tooling for Claude Code (Obsidian/OMI), with a local web app to view, edit, and add agent memory.
  • dave — a standalone LoRA adapter (QLoRA fine-tune of Llama-3.3-70B) for writing security-assessment reports; separate from the Ronin 48 suite below.
  • Ronin 48 expert-system suite — LoRA adapters fine-tuned on open-source base models for high-stakes domains I actually work in: BONES (EMS clinical), BRUNO (fire-service tactical), ATTICUS (criminal-defense), SELMA (law enforcement), and ABBY (forensic).
  • 1812 — self-hosted Discord chatbot with pluggable LLM backends and persistent memory.
  • Triage — a meta-scheduler that watches signals and reorders its own priority queue.
  • Hydra — multi-OS bootable-USB builder (Ventoy + Ubuntu LTS + Kali Live) with QEMU boot-testing.

I also contribute to OWASP ZAP, Libation (merged PR #1814), and hermes-agent.

This blog

Write-ups of things I’ve actually built or broken: homelab plumbing, Tailscale and UniFi networking, local LLM inference, MCP and AI-agent tooling, the occasional Windows-server war story, and security odds and ends. Real commands, real gotchas, and generic-enough details that you can paste them into your own setup — the guide I’d have wanted to find myself at 2 a.m.

Off the clock

Nebraska-based. EMT-B and probationary firefighter with the Minden Volunteer Fire Department, sometime WiCyS mentor, and — when there’s time — traveling, carpentry in the shop, and running a session of Alternity (1998), the greatest tabletop RPG ever made.

Credentials

Education

  • MS in Data Analytics — Eastern University (in progress)
  • B.S. Computer and Information Science — UMUC
  • MicroMaster’s in Cybersecurity — RIT
  • Graduate certificates — Kennesaw State · Colorado State

Certifications — SSCP · AWS Solutions Architect Associate · CompTIA A+/Network+

Memberships — OWASP · ACM · DC402 · RITSEC

Find me

Proudly Made in Nebraska. Go Big Red! 🌽