• Bio

  I am a software developer in Brooklyn. I helped grow a high-frequency trading company into one of the top 10 firms in the world for volume, I built the tech for the first online property bought by MTV, and I've done software engineering for Twitter. Columbia University awarded me for excellence in teaching engineering.
• Dayo

  

  Daily weather on your lockscreen

  Tells you the weather like a human does, by the time you wake up.

  Lead developer and co-product lead. Still actively working on this. Used it to learn Parse platform. Experimenting with algorithmic content generation and the lockscreen/push notifications as content medium.

  Tech I used: Swift, Obj-C, JS, Parse service
• Underground

  

  Pseudonymous group messaging app: "Share thoughts with people like you"

  Co-developer, co-creator. A labor of love, but never clicked with users. Biggest rails backend I've built, with decent testing framework and worker queue. There’s lots here that I’m still waiting for a more prominent product to deliver.

  Tech I used: Obj-c, Rails
• eHighlighter

  

  eBook-style highlighting for real-world books

  Updated this app to address 2 years of UX/UI issues and feature requests. Used it to learn ios. The big stumbling block to this being better is the so-so proprietary OCR we’re using.

  Tech I used: Obj-C
• Hudson River Trading

  Algorithmic trading

  I was an algorithm developer, coder and trader for 6 years, as the company went from 10 people to 100+. I learned a huge amount about problem solving and data science, and how much more important steady application of intelligence is to hard problems than genius. I was never really that into finance, but I loved working with smart people.

  Tech I used: C++, Perl, Python, shell scripting

• Intro/summary for recruiters
• Consulting/freelance: $150/hr. No surprises, initial phone conversation is free.
• Rate for nonprofits: $100/hr. No surprises, initial phone conversation is free.
• Recommendations:

  "Ben engineered an ace online video platform that made our show's website interactive in a way no one had ever done before, and helped us get the show picked up by MTV.” --Morgan Spurlock

  "Benjamin has been a crucial asset to the Presidential Administration. I recommend him without reservation." --Mikheil Saakashvili, former President of Georgia

  "Thanks for doing the impossible, with a smile." --Ryan Troy, Twitter Live Global Lead

  "We'd like all of our partner organizations to gain insight from your work!" --Christy Crawford, Director of Strategic Partnerships & Industry Engagement, Computer Science For All, NYC Department of Education

Key: one icon for each year of experience;
color indicates how positive or negative I feel about the language.

• My github gists
• The Maker’s Pledge: a proposal
• Quiz game circuit project for kids (from The Best of Make Magazine)
• How Product Hunt really works
• Using the Colemak keyboard layout
• On utopian languages and keyboard layouts
• What's the story behind the West Village's DIY electric car? (from Make Magazine)
• What to try when typing hurts
• On the nature of tech product work
• Programming is Supposed to Be Messy (from TechStars' Startup Institute)