Sr. Staff Engineer
Ben Bernard
Experienced, user focused Principal level web developer. Co-founder & CTO of Fieldbook. Tech leader at: Amazon, Google, Gremlin, Flexport, Gremlin
Experienced, user focused Principal level web developer. Co-founder & CTO of Fieldbook. Tech leader at: Amazon, Google, Gremlin, Flexport, Gremlin
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Experience
Staff Engineer
Flexport is a digital-first freight forwarder, disrupting a huge market with lots of government regulation. While at Flexport, I worked on the Ocean team and the Quoting team,... more covering those two areas of the product. Some of the projects I was involved in:
- Parsing complicated Ocean Carrier contracts for use in reconciling bills with contracted rates
- Creating a chrome extension to manage document upload directly from Gmail, using InboxSDK, and writing a matching framework figuring out shipments from email, reducing manual ops burden on these tasks greatly.
- Migrating old react components to GraphQL to reduce tech debt and migrate to new servers
- Education, evangelism, leading discussions, and document writing around creating a service oriented architecture.
- Taming a wild and complex codebase so it stops breaking all the time, greatly reducing PSUPs and solving a bunch of low hanging fruit blocking internal users from moving quickly.
- Co-authored a great browser integration testing system for Ruby and selenium. Saw large adoption, going from single-digit integrations tests to hundreds. Wrote a browser extension and page object framework that greatly reduced test instability.
- Contributed to the local development environment by allowing customization of docker containers for individual developers and many other scripts and tools for local work.
- Contributed to the design of an auto-requote system that reduced operations workload from ~2 days a month on requoting tasks to 0 days.
At Flexport I have to lead the Quoting team working on the difficult problem of margin management, and service selection for all of Flexport's clients. I also co-wrote an integration testing framework that has allowed hundreds of browser tests to be written at Flexport.
I also worked on a Gmail extension to integrate our internal website with Gmail at a deep level to optimize employee productivity and worked on EDIFACT data interfaces with ocean carriers.
- Parsing complicated Ocean Carrier contracts for use in reconciling bills with contracted rates
- Creating a chrome extension to manage document upload directly from Gmail, using InboxSDK, and writing a matching framework figuring out shipments from email, reducing manual ops burden on these tasks greatly.
- Migrating old react components to GraphQL to reduce tech debt and migrate to new servers
- Education, evangelism, leading discussions, and document writing around creating a service oriented architecture.
- Taming a wild and complex codebase so it stops breaking all the time, greatly reducing PSUPs and solving a bunch of low hanging fruit blocking internal users from moving quickly.
- Co-authored a great browser integration testing system for Ruby and selenium. Saw large adoption, going from single-digit integrations tests to hundreds. Wrote a browser extension and page object framework that greatly reduced test instability.
- Contributed to the local development environment by allowing customization of docker containers for individual developers and many other scripts and tools for local work.
- Contributed to the design of an auto-requote system that reduced operations workload from ~2 days a month on requoting tasks to 0 days.
At Flexport I have to lead the Quoting team working on the difficult problem of margin management, and service selection for all of Flexport's clients. I also co-wrote an integration testing framework that has allowed hundreds of browser tests to be written at Flexport.
I also worked on a Gmail extension to integrate our internal website with Gmail at a deep level to optimize employee productivity and worked on EDIFACT data interfaces with ocean carriers.
Exit
Fieldbook
Co Founder & CTO
Co-founder and CTO of Fieldbook. Fieldbook was an exciting tool to manage your personal data. Where spreadsheets become cumbersome and difficult to use, Fieldbook was a flexible... more and powerful online database for understanding and tracking your personal data. At Fieldbook I was responsible for the technical design and implementation of virtually every aspect of the product. We were a small team, and everyone wore all the hats.
Specific difficult efforts include an offline graph traversal and recalculation engine leveraging Postgres and RabbitMQ to provide server-side computation for formulas even on large data sets. We have also implemented a deep realtime update system using RabbitMQ, Socket.io and our own last write wins system that can provide a distributed consensus even in the face of out of order delivery. We also built a spreadsheet table for large amounts of data, including smooth scrolling and variable height rows. Finally, we developed an isolated and secure service for running untrusted code in docker instances to power our Codelets feature, an instantly deployed endpoint running user code.
We used Node, Backbone, RabbitMQ, Socket.io, Postgres via Amazon RDS, Mongo, Docker, CircleCI, and other technologies at Fieldbook.
Specific difficult efforts include an offline graph traversal and recalculation engine leveraging Postgres and RabbitMQ to provide server-side computation for formulas even on large data sets. We have also implemented a deep realtime update system using RabbitMQ, Socket.io and our own last write wins system that can provide a distributed consensus even in the face of out of order delivery. We also built a spreadsheet table for large amounts of data, including smooth scrolling and variable height rows. Finally, we developed an isolated and secure service for running untrusted code in docker instances to power our Codelets feature, an instantly deployed endpoint running user code.
We used Node, Backbone, RabbitMQ, Socket.io, Postgres via Amazon RDS, Mongo, Docker, CircleCI, and other technologies at Fieldbook.
Software Engineer
I work on GroupOn's Breadcrumb Pro iPad Point of Sale system. We work on python and ruby on the server-side, and iOS / Objective-C on the client-side. During my time here... more I've implemented a new reporting framework, implemented alternate tender and gift card support. Re-architected credit card handling for PCI requirements. I've designed and implemented all of these projects for both the client and the server.
Later in my time at Groupon, I managed the Breadcrumb 1.x team, implementing support for alternate tender types, gift cards (both selling and buying with), and nonrevenue items. I managed a split team of local devs and remote contractors.
Later in my time at Groupon, I managed the Breadcrumb 1.x team, implementing support for alternate tender types, gift cards (both selling and buying with), and nonrevenue items. I managed a split team of local devs and remote contractors.
Software Engineer
Some of the projects I have a lead on the video management team include. Building an indexer to enable private video searching for any size of users, in the map-reduce framework... more capable of processing the entire Youtube video corpus in under 6 hours. Building a monitoring system for the thumbnail changing daemon and reducing outages in that system.
The major project I was involved with was a rewrite of the video editing and video upload workflow. We (a team of 3-4 engineers) worked to implement a slick new javascript driven interface. We had to nail down requirements, and integrate customer feedback while keeping the page simple, functional, and beautiful. I worked on most aspects of this project, but especially the integration into the edit page and the monetization setting pieces. This required me to quickly understand and internalize a large complex system and offer a clear interface for novice users to use to accomplish their goal of making money. We used javascript, python, spitfire, CSS, MySQL, and Closure on this project. This project required coordinating with a team of developers in Zurich who were working with us on the project.
I have continued my strategy of implementing developer productivity tools in my spare time and have developed several systems for helping youtube developers. One is a live debugging tool that lets you debug python with real data (but with safeguards). Another is a fast client switching system that allows me to vastly decrease context switch times when working on multiple changes at once. Finally, I developed a system for saving editing state and resuming it so you can leave and come back to a project and start right back up where it was left.
Worked on the Video management team. I drove a project to update the video editing metadata component, launched with almost no errors. Also drove a personalized search through creators own videos, and a spitfire templating language debugging tool
The major project I was involved with was a rewrite of the video editing and video upload workflow. We (a team of 3-4 engineers) worked to implement a slick new javascript driven interface. We had to nail down requirements, and integrate customer feedback while keeping the page simple, functional, and beautiful. I worked on most aspects of this project, but especially the integration into the edit page and the monetization setting pieces. This required me to quickly understand and internalize a large complex system and offer a clear interface for novice users to use to accomplish their goal of making money. We used javascript, python, spitfire, CSS, MySQL, and Closure on this project. This project required coordinating with a team of developers in Zurich who were working with us on the project.
I have continued my strategy of implementing developer productivity tools in my spare time and have developed several systems for helping youtube developers. One is a live debugging tool that lets you debug python with real data (but with safeguards). Another is a fast client switching system that allows me to vastly decrease context switch times when working on multiple changes at once. Finally, I developed a system for saving editing state and resuming it so you can leave and come back to a project and start right back up where it was left.
Worked on the Video management team. I drove a project to update the video editing metadata component, launched with almost no errors. Also drove a personalized search through creators own videos, and a spitfire templating language debugging tool
Exit
SDE
SDE III - Platform Excellence
On the Latency team, I have been responsible for driving down the page load times for many of the most important pages on the Amazon.com website.... more I have personally worked on the Item Detail page latency and the Checkout page latency. I have been critical in doing Amazon's experimentation with tcp stack tuning, such as initial congestion window and exploring CDN based tcp proxies to speed up international customers. I have also been the primary developer on our baseline pages that establish an absolute minimum on the speed of pages on Amazon's presentation technology. A co-worker and I also developed a visualization tool for examining the flow of packets in a webpage request, from handshake to fin across many hosts.
Outside of my job description, I have also been responsible for the "Env Improvement Ninjas" effort inside of Amazon, which is an ad-hoc group of programmers who write useful tools for the company. We have seen great adoption of our tools and updated toolsets throughout the company, with deployments to many production boxes across the company. Included in this tool set is a vip management tool, a tool for managing in progress changes with our deployment system, and an internal s3 backed encrypting proxy, all of which were built entirely by me.
In this role I primarily worked with data analysis tools like RecordStream, tcpdump, ethereal, perl, java, excel.
SDE III - Seller Central Tech
I was responsible for the tech direction and vision for the framework of the Seller Central team. Seller Central is the website that Sellers use to manage their presence on Amazon.com for third party items or websites. I was also instrumental in the organization's large 'convergence' project. Which was a project to unify the management of small seller and full enterprise sellers. For convergence, I wrote a multi-threaded migration process that migrated over 1.5 billion transactions from a legacy 3rd party payments system to a much stricter modern service, written in Java. I have also been responsible for the general availability and latency of the Seller Central website. I helped designed a tool to determine what specific dependent systems were to blame for any given customer outage, resulting in vastly decreased resolution times.. During this time I have also written several tools for developers on the website including both a login debugger to help diagnose customer login problems and a rights debugger to help us see why a customer is missing a particular right on the website. I also designed an instantly invalidating cache that allowed us to reduce load on services by 75%.
In this job I worked with many commandline tools, perl, java and C++. I became very proficient at system administration and debugging in high impact ways for high profile issues (generally to facilitate other teams' efforts to resolve issues). I was a leader in this space and gave several talks on the techniques and strategies I developed in this role.
SDE II - Developer Tools
(Description for SDEII and SDEI role in Developer tools) Responsible for metrics project to gather statistics on local developers makes on Amazon workstations. Designed and implemented a replacement for a single globally mounted datastore with a remote redundant and scalable datastore, interacted with through standard UNIX tools. Supported users with compiler, linker, source control, install and build system issues. Responsible for build system training class. Helped web developers transition into standard source control and build systems.
In more recently years I have been in charge of vision and overall architecture of this space, from the encrypting S3 Proxy currently housing more than 10T of encrypted data to the fully-parallel build system that will allow the build system to become a tier 1 service. Additionally I have been active in the development community at Amazon, creating many tools to make other developer's lives easier as well as building and maintaining a community around tool development, for which I have received a "Just Do It" award.
SDE I - Developer Tools
See SDE II - Developer Tools description
On the Latency team, I have been responsible for driving down the page load times for many of the most important pages on the Amazon.com website.... more I have personally worked on the Item Detail page latency and the Checkout page latency. I have been critical in doing Amazon's experimentation with tcp stack tuning, such as initial congestion window and exploring CDN based tcp proxies to speed up international customers. I have also been the primary developer on our baseline pages that establish an absolute minimum on the speed of pages on Amazon's presentation technology. A co-worker and I also developed a visualization tool for examining the flow of packets in a webpage request, from handshake to fin across many hosts.
Outside of my job description, I have also been responsible for the "Env Improvement Ninjas" effort inside of Amazon, which is an ad-hoc group of programmers who write useful tools for the company. We have seen great adoption of our tools and updated toolsets throughout the company, with deployments to many production boxes across the company. Included in this tool set is a vip management tool, a tool for managing in progress changes with our deployment system, and an internal s3 backed encrypting proxy, all of which were built entirely by me.
In this role I primarily worked with data analysis tools like RecordStream, tcpdump, ethereal, perl, java, excel.
SDE III - Seller Central Tech
I was responsible for the tech direction and vision for the framework of the Seller Central team. Seller Central is the website that Sellers use to manage their presence on Amazon.com for third party items or websites. I was also instrumental in the organization's large 'convergence' project. Which was a project to unify the management of small seller and full enterprise sellers. For convergence, I wrote a multi-threaded migration process that migrated over 1.5 billion transactions from a legacy 3rd party payments system to a much stricter modern service, written in Java. I have also been responsible for the general availability and latency of the Seller Central website. I helped designed a tool to determine what specific dependent systems were to blame for any given customer outage, resulting in vastly decreased resolution times.. During this time I have also written several tools for developers on the website including both a login debugger to help diagnose customer login problems and a rights debugger to help us see why a customer is missing a particular right on the website. I also designed an instantly invalidating cache that allowed us to reduce load on services by 75%.
In this job I worked with many commandline tools, perl, java and C++. I became very proficient at system administration and debugging in high impact ways for high profile issues (generally to facilitate other teams' efforts to resolve issues). I was a leader in this space and gave several talks on the techniques and strategies I developed in this role.
SDE II - Developer Tools
(Description for SDEII and SDEI role in Developer tools) Responsible for metrics project to gather statistics on local developers makes on Amazon workstations. Designed and implemented a replacement for a single globally mounted datastore with a remote redundant and scalable datastore, interacted with through standard UNIX tools. Supported users with compiler, linker, source control, install and build system issues. Responsible for build system training class. Helped web developers transition into standard source control and build systems.
In more recently years I have been in charge of vision and overall architecture of this space, from the encrypting S3 Proxy currently housing more than 10T of encrypted data to the fully-parallel build system that will allow the build system to become a tier 1 service. Additionally I have been active in the development community at Amazon, creating many tools to make other developer's lives easier as well as building and maintaining a community around tool development, for which I have received a "Just Do It" award.
SDE I - Developer Tools
See SDE II - Developer Tools description
Employee
Projects
Comandline data analysis toolset
Developer, Perl, Shell Scripting · App::RecordStream - recs - A system for command-line analysis of data A set of programs for creating, manipulating,… · More and outputting a stream of Records, or JSON hashes. Inspired by Monad. The quickest way to start using recs is via the minimal, standalone bundle: curl -fsSL https://recs.pl > recs chmod +x recs ./recs --help This is also known as the "fatpacked" recs.
One of 2 main developers
One of 2 main developers
Education
About
Achievements
Just Do It Award at Amazon
Co-developer of RecordStream, a command-line data analysis tool.
Skills
Locations