Hi, I'm Ben. Welcome to my website.

My main job is writing software and I've been doing it for a paycheck since 2008 at companies big and small. I also went viral once with some friends for being good at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

You may know me around the internet at:

You may have seen some things I made:

  • isthereaseattlehomegametoday.com does what it says on the tin (GitHub)AWS EventBridge triggers a Lambda function every morning that checks the day's events, renders HTML, uploads to S3, and invalidates the CloudFront cache.
  • AuthThingie 2 is a forward-auth authentication system for reverse proxies.A mature, security-focused authentication layer that is feature-rich. Supports 2FA, Passkeys, RBAC, and an automatic way of detecting trusted proxies via Docker tags
  • HQ Trivia Bot is an experiment in reverse engineering, language processing, and knowledgeAn older project, but a really fun one that taught me a lot. Written in Scala, it answers live trivia questions using an ensemble of different solvers with confidence scoring
  • fileflinger is a way to share files from a home webserver with no copying and an interesting security modelInstead of copying files or working with paths, the server doesn't have read access to the disk outside its own configuration. Everything is done by FD passing via Unix sockets
  • bucket-stream is a useful tool for building 24/7 Twitch streams from videos in an S3 bucketPoint it at an S3 bucket and a Twitch channel, and you get a rotating stream of videos that runs forever

You may be curious about places I've worked:

  • A video game company (2020 - present) where I am working on some secret stuff. Mostly online services related.
  • A financial services company that originates loans (2015 - 2020) where I worked on software to validate that loans conformed to jurisdictional rules as well as document analysis using NLP and OCR.
  • A large tech company named after a river (2008 - 2015) where I worked on video ingestion and encoding pipelines, CD/DVD replication and authoring, and e-reader software.

You may wonder how to get a hold of me:

  • Honestly, just DM me on Bluesky. My DMs are open.