MJ Bonanno

Speaking

Panels, podcasts,
and chapter rooms.

Every talk comes out of something I built and had to make work: public safety systems in production, an engineering organization scaled through an acquisition, AI infrastructure that survives real traffic. Nothing borrowed from a business book.

I am booking my first rooms on purpose. Chapter meetings, academy classes, podcasts, and panels are where I want to start, and I will happily tailor any of these for a breakout track or a classroom.

Check my availability Bio & headshot

Six of them

The talks.

Each one is tailored to the room. Tell me the audience and the slot length and I will shape it to fit.

  1. From Paper to Platform

    How a paper program in a glovebox ended up wired into 911 dispatch.

    The Blue Envelope program created critical awareness around disability safety during law enforcement encounters. This talk examines how that grassroots foundation became NPS-AID, now with participants in more than 40 states, and what it took to land the first CAD and 911 integrated deployment in Cumberland County, New Jersey. The architecture, the integration work, and the collaboration between advocacy and technology that got a paper program into dispatch.

    Ideal forIACP and state chapter meetings · Disability advocacy groups · Police academies · Public safety conferences

  2. Building for the Badge

    Why most GovTech dies before a single user sees it.

    Why most GovTech companies die before their product reaches a single end user, and the strategies that got a platform adopted at state, county, municipal, and corrections level in one state before it went anywhere else. Covers the full lifecycle: the 18-month procurement cycles that test your runway, the meeting before the meeting that actually determines adoption, the stakeholder politics that kill more companies than bad products ever will, and the trust-building that no amount of engineering can shortcut.

    Ideal forGovTech meetups and podcasts · Public safety industry events · Product leadership groups · Technology conferences

  3. 5 Squared

    Five engineers became twenty-five, and the team became a freight train.

    We went from five engineers to twenty-five across distributed locations, and at some point the team started shipping faster than stakeholders could write requirements. This talk is what actually did it: which hires changed the slope and which ones cost us six months, what broke at twelve people that had not broken at eight, the two things I got wrong about remote teams, and why the hardest part was never engineering. It was keeping everyone above us aligned long enough for the team to stay pointed in one direction.

    Ideal forEngineering leadership meetups · CTO peer groups and podcasts · Startup and scale-up events

  4. Teaching a Database to Forget

    I built a memory tool, hit its ceiling in 48 hours, and started over on the engine.

    In February 2026 I built Memento, persistent memory for AI tools, so every session had the context of every session before it. Two days later I stopped, because patching memory on top of a search index cannot work: similarity tells you what looks alike, never what matters. Four days after that I started over at the layer below. MuninnDB makes forgetting a first-class engine primitive, using Ebbinghaus decay, Hebbian association, and Bayesian confidence, so memories strengthen with use and fade without it. This talk is that arc: recognizing when a patch is the wrong shape, what it costs to restart at the layer below, and why the current generation of AI products is bounded by memory rather than intelligence.

    Ideal forDeveloper meetups and podcasts · AI/ML tracks · Data infrastructure groups · University classes

  5. The Cloud Didn’t Come With a Manual

    A decade in AWS, self-taught, running a national platform.

    An honest journey through the AWS ecosystem over 10+ years, from spinning up a first EC2 instance to running a platform serving 674 agencies across nine states. The services I started with, the ones I wasted money on, the architecture I’d build from day one if I could do it again, and the decisions that actually matter when you’re a small team building something real. No certifications required. No jargon.

    Ideal forUniversity and academy classes · Small business and startup groups · Cloud and developer meetups

  6. Negative 30

    $30K in debt after the crash, on a loan against my parents’ house.

    The 2008 crash wiped out my first company and left me $30K down, funded by a home equity loan against my parents’ house. What followed: 16 to 18 hour days at a consulting firm, evenings at my tattoo shop, the gym at 9pm, remodeling a fixer-upper until 1am. I paid it off in a year, bought my first house at 29 with $3K down, and flipped three houses while building businesses. A talk about what happens when your back is against the wall.

    Ideal forEntrepreneurship podcasts · University programs · Founder and small business groups

Press kit

Take what you need.

MJ Bonanno Download headshot (JPG)

short bio · 27 words

MJ Bonanno is a platform architect and serial founder whose software runs across New Jersey law enforcement at every level, and at 674 agencies across nine states.

medium bio · 86 words

MJ Bonanno is a platform architect, engineering executive, and serial founder. He is a founding member of Online Policing Solutions, where he architected three platforms now running across New Jersey law enforcement at every level, from the state police to municipal departments to corrections, and at 674 agencies across nine states. Its NPS-AID program has participants in more than 40 states and its first CAD-integrated deployment in Cumberland County, New Jersey. He is also the sole author of MuninnDB, an open-source cognitive database for AI systems.

long bio · 172 words

MJ Bonanno is a platform architect, engineering executive, and serial founder with over twenty years of building. He started managing servers and network infrastructure for a school district at 14 and shipped production software for a real company at 16. He is a founding member of Online Policing Solutions, where he designed the architecture behind OPS LENS, NPS-AID, and OPS Hubs, three platforms now running across New Jersey law enforcement at every level, from the state police to municipal departments to corrections, and at 674 agencies across nine states. Its NPS-AID disability safety program has participants in more than 40 states, with its first CAD and 911 integrated deployment live in Cumberland County, New Jersey. He is the sole author of MuninnDB, an open-source cognitive database whose engine treats memory decay, association, and confidence as native primitives rather than application logic. He has founded six companies across five industries without venture capital, scaled an engineering organization from five to twenty-five through a bank acquisition, and publishes technical work through the Scrypster channel.

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