Jul 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 10 mos · Remote

• Solo founder building profitable businesses. I post about my journey here on LinkedIn and on all of these platforms:
• X: https://x.com/ben_makes_stuff
• Twitch: https://twitch.tv/ben_makes_stuff
• WIP: https://wip.co/@ben
• Mockernut Ventures LLC is the holding company for all of my businesses.

May 2023 – Jul 2023 · 2 mos

• After a great several years at DoorDash, I took time off to mentally reset and to:
• Do some extended travel in my favorite part of the world, Southeast Asia
• Complete an applied AI course
• Launch some web app ideas I had for a while to see if any of them would gain traction
• Level up my cooking and drink mixing game
• Play and produce more music (I had neglected my guitar over the past couple years)

Jul 2018 – May 2023 · 4 yrs 10 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Technologies: Kotlin, Scala, Kafka, Python, Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Terraform, AWS Lambda
• Serving as the technical lead for the Drive New Verticals team at DoorDash:
• 1. Led a team of 5 engineers to build a new parcel sortation system which allows for efficient ordering of packages located in a warehouse and handoff of said parcels to inbound drivers. My direct contribution was the system design, which involved an event driven approach to minimize latency; I also built the API used by associates to scan packages in the warehouse. This system enabled DoorDash to fulfill new kinds of orders from partners like Macy's, Petco, etc.
• 2. Led a team of 3 engineers to scale DoorDash's routing engine's throughput by 30x using async processing. This effort was the only reason DoorDash was able to fulfill a large number of unexpected deliveries for time-sensitive COVID-19 relief efforts and, later, holiday demand for major retailers:
• https://www.unitedway.org/the-latest/press/one-million-meals-delivered#
• https://twitter.com/nycmayor/status/1241158218396708865
• https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-public-schools-partnership-with-doordash-is-delivering/283-370102b2-e3de-4b45-b6be-a855e10a8202
• 3. Led a team of 2 engineers to build the DoorDash Shopper App, and developed a large portion of the code for said project. Specifically, set up the project structure from scratch including dependency management, testing framework, DB driver, CI/CD to multiple environments; built out all user registration flows and several additional public-facing APIs to support pick/pack of items. This project directly enabled the launch of several major grocery brands on DoorDash.
• 4. Single-handedly rewrote several existing services to allow merchants without an engineering staff to integrate with DoorDash via email instead of API. This effort allowed DoorDash to close deals with several critical NYC-based merchants that were previously using competitors' software.

Dec 2017 – Apr 2018 · 4 mos · Greater San Diego Area

• Technologies: .NET Core, Node.js, Linux, Docker, Azure Container Registry, Azure Service Bus, SQL Server 2017, Angular 5, TypeScript, Elasticsearch
• As the tech lead for the infrastructure team, I spent 80% of my time writing code to fix critical scaling issues with our system / engineering team, 10% of my time advising various feature teams on architecture-related decisions, and 10% of my time on automation/devops tasks. For example, I:
• 1. Prevented mission critical SQL databases from reaching maximum capacity via a tool to move hundreds of GB of data from SQL Server to Azure Table Storage (very similar to Cassandra), using parallel processing.
• 2. Automated the previously manual process of creating incident reports with a Slack Bot (using Node.js) that created OpsGenie alerts based off chat messages received via the Slack Events API.
• 3. Overhauled Veyo's CI/CD workflow by implementing GitHub for source control, CircleCI for Linux builds, and AppVeyor for Windows builds. I also built various tools in Node.js that allowed developers to easily deploy services to production in bulk (previously, deployment to production was manual and error prone).

Apr 2016 – Dec 2017 · 1 yr 8 mos · Greater San Diego Area

• Technologies: .NET Core, Linux, Docker, Azure Container Registry, Azure Service Bus, SQL Server 2017, Angular 5, TypeScript, Elasticsearch
• 1. Founding engineer for a project that allowed healthcare facilities to easily manage appointments for their patients and see where drivers were in real-time. I built some critical pieces of the system myself (related to the message queue that we used to replicate data) and spent the rest of my time advising a team of 4 on how to build testable, performant APIs.
• 2. Built a background job that is used to schedule complex recurring appointments across multiple time zones.
• 3. Built a service that is used to efficiently process large volumes of medical data from various customers. Said solution is able to process this dataset in 10 minutes while an existing solution took 4 days to do the same.
• 4. Routinely conducted technical interviews and helped to make hiring decisions for junior and senior level candidates for engineering, product, and QA positions. Developed a take-home coding test for QA candidates to complete.

Dec 2017 – Dec 2020 · 3 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area

• Technologies: Go, CircleCI, AWS, PostgreSQL, Vue.js, JavaScript, ElasticSearch
• ATGATT aggregated motorcycle helmet safety data and made it easier for users to understand which helmets had the best chance of saving their lives in a crash scenario. As the founder, I:
• 1. Built all components of the app myself, including the frontend with Vue.js, the background job that aggregates motorcycle crash data in Go, and the API used to retrieve the data in Go.
• 2. Built a "search relevance" algorithm to figure out which data should be shown together.
• 3. Conducted all marketing and user research using Google Forms, Reddit Ads, Twitter, and Facebook Groups.
• 4. Created business entity and reached (ramen) profitability in 3 months.
• 5. Recruited a technical co-founder.

Mar 2015 – Apr 2015 · 1 mo · Houston, Texas Area

• While working remotely, developed the prototype for a voting application similar to reddit from the ground up, using Python and Django on the backend and raw JavaScript along with c3.js and jQuery on the frontend. Additionally, did all of the design and development of the database schema for said application using MySQL.

May 2014 – Apr 2016 · 1 yr 11 mos · Greater San Diego Area

• Technologies: C#, ASP.NET MVC 5, WCF, JavaScript, Kendo UI, Windows Workflow, Entity Framework, MSSQL, SignalR, Gulp, Node.js
• Was a founding member of a team involved in building a web application to provide an issue tracking system similar to what is currently offered by Salesforce.
• Also did full-stack development on a web application that is used to manage configuration items for most of Qualcomm's modem software.
• 1. Mentored two new engineers.
• 2. Improved a heavily used UI's rendering time from 20 seconds to 2 seconds.
• 3. Developed a workflow application that is now used in place of a process that used to take up 45 minutes of manual data entry per customer ticket. The new application that I wrote takes less than 5 minutes to complete and requires no manual data entry.

May 2013 – Aug 2013 · 3 mos · Greater San Diego Area

• 1. For the QCT Static Analysis team, wrote Python scripts in order to improve build automation systems.
• 2. For the same team, used Klocwork Desktop to help identify and fix vulnerabilities in various modem releases.
• 3. Wrote proof-of-concept code in C to help Klocwork's engineers reduce false positive results.
• 4. Received a “Qualstar” work performance award for the work completed during my internship.

Mar 2013 – May 2013 · 2 mos · Austin, Texas Area

• 1. Implemented the initial version of the “Create Report” frontend and improved data set filtering for the Genome Comparison & Analytic Testing (GCAT) product, located at: http://www.bioplanet.com/gcat/.
• 2. Used multi-threading and raw MySQL queries in Ruby to create a data importer that processed ~70 million records in approximately 90 minutes.

Sep 2011 – Dec 2011 · 3 mos · Blacksburg, Virginia area

• 1. Utilized Objective-C and C to interface with the Microsoft Kinect on a Mac OS X workstation. Used OpenCV and OpenNI for hand gesture recognition.
• 2. Wrote Perl scripts to analyze fly genome data, comparing results from GATK and SRMA.
• 3. Installed and tested CUDA and OpenCL on a Ubuntu Server machine.

Sep 2008 – Aug 2012 · 3 yrs 11 mos · Washington D.C. Metro Area

• 1. Wrote MapReduce jobs to generate test data and analyze large HBase tables. Reduced running time of existing processes from 8-10 hours to 25 minutes.
• 2. Wrote a search suggestions algorithm to populate and analyze data from an Apache Cassandra cluster.
• 3. Wrote web applications for the open-source Synapse Application Framework in JavaScript, using jQuery and ExtJS to visualize intelligence data in 2D.
• 4. Mentored a high-school intern and two newer full-time employees in JavaScript development.
• 5. Created bash shell scripts to manage a Solaris application; researched virtual platforms for said application.