I didn't start there. Morgan State, then intake software for a health nonprofit in Baltimore, then BlueMeta, the consultancy I founded. BlueMeta was one of eight companies selected for Hutch, the two-year government-contracting incubator, Class of 2024, and it shipped civic tools for HBCUs, the Census Bureau, and others. Different work, same thing pulling at me underneath all of it: not “does this app work,” but “should this person be let through at all?”

That question is my whole job now. For the last 13 months I've worked on identity proofing on login.gov, the federal government's NIST 800-63 platform, over 100 million accounts across 50+ agencies. I've come to think about verification as two numbers in tension. Completion rate has to go up: real people, some with a cracked camera or a battered ID, have to make it through. False-accept rate has to go down: the wrong person cannot. The craft is moving one without giving up the other, and you feel it both ways, someone wrongly turned away from a benefit they qualify for, and the fraud you'd wave through if you loosened the wrong bolt. I have worked both sides of that dial.

The pattern I keep coming back to is simple to say and hard to do: grant, scope, fail closed. I was also lead engineer on a remote mobile driver's license proof of concept, the privacy-preserving way to prove who you are, work that is headed for a NIST publication.

Lately the question is bigger than people. When I look at AI agents, I see the exact problem I work on every day: who are you, and what are you allowed to touch. Verification is how powerful capability reaches the right people without reaching the wrong ones. That is the thread through everything here, and it is why I write.

Away from the terminal: I travel when I can, play a lot of pickleball, ride trails, game, and yes, you can catch me at karaoke. Right now I'm building my own Steam Machine, a little home console I'm loading with the classic couch co-op games I grew up on, so I have something to play with my nephew when we are together. Half nostalgia project, half excuse to build the hardware myself.

~ Malik