Hi, I’m Ben!

I’m a back-end developer with a focus on networking, infrastructure, and security. I love coding in Go, Python, and Typescript. I’m also passionate about people, and always curious about how different folks learn and grow together, how to maintain happy and healthy teams, things like that.

I’ve built back-ends for ISPs, infrastructure for non-profits, tooling for open-source researchers, large physical networks, and more.

Some hats I’ve worn

I recently completed a batch at the Recurse Center, which you can read a bit about here on my blog. Before that:

• I spent four years or so as a sysadmin building infrastructure for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• I’ve worked a few shorter networking roles, like writing software for an event-oriented ISP, working as a network tech for a local ISP in San Francisco, and volunteering with community-run networks.
• I had a stint as a graduate researcher as a buzzword engineer of sorts, in which I got to do some interesting graph data modeling.
• Once upon a time, I just spent a lot of time studying math. I still like to do this recreationally.

Supporting journalists and researchers

In my free time, I like to work on small digital tools for folks doing open-source intelligence in various human rights spaces. You can see some examples on my projects page.

I’m particularly interested in policing, surveillance, incarceration, and their intersections, but I’ll also bite if you have a fun technical problem in this space. For example, I’m happy to collaborate on:

• automating social media investigations, image verification, etc
• streamlining research workflows
• wrangling data
• ensuring work is reproducible (source-controlling data pipelines, backing up third party sources, etc)

…and maybe more! If you’re a researcher, let me know what would be helpful to you. :) Just reach out via the Twitter Mastodon or email links at the bottom of the page.