Benjamin Kenawell

My code portfolio

Summary

An engineer: capable of designing responsive websites and web apps, robust servers, coordinating services and managing operations to deploy it all end to end. Focused and hard working
A leader: drive effective collaboration and teach best practices to go further together
A continual learner: listen and learn from colleagues, reading books, and interacting with coding legends to help build best engineering maturity

Employers

97 Labs
Software Engineer
2021 — Present
Microsoft
Software Engineer
2018 — 2021
Microsoft
Software Development Intern
Summer 2017
Penn State Residence Life
Resident Assistant
2016 — 2017
Penn State ITS Lab Consultant
Lab Consultant and Supervisor
2014 — 2018

Experience

8 years as a software engineer in large enterprise and small startups
Lead teams through projects from inception to shipping and iterating
Contribute to React, Typescript, NextJS, NestJS, GraphQL codebases
Improve developer experience with Bash, Docker, mise, CI/CD, AI
Collaborate across departments, coordinating with stakeholders
Write, maintain, and enforce standards across product, code, and design
Advise and implement large, codebase--defining architecture decisions
Contribute to open source projects
Fork projects internally to unblock, then work to upstream patches
Run my blog: written in WebOrigami, hosted on an OpenTofu managed DigitalOcean Droplet behind a Caddy service supervised by a systemd service unit using nfpm to deploy a deb package for updates

Volunteer

Education

The Pennsylvania State University

Class of 2018

BS Computer Engineering
Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Awards

Eagle Scout
Class of 2013
Boy Scouts of America, Troop 2

Software Philosophy

I am agile and capable working within a team's best practices. I am skilled at defining best practices when needed. The bullets below summarize my software approach:

Easy–to–reference, written communication best scopes features and minimizes scope creep
A well architected codebase improves velocity more than extra developers
Philosophy of Software Design is worth rereading
Make the hard thing easy, do the easy thing
Data has inertia, client code a little less, server code is most malleable
Server driven user interactions with fast feedback
Deploy quickly, but know how to iterate next