Bio
My name is Benji, and I’m a Gopher!
About Me
An obsession with computers began early in my childhood. By my teens I was building and repairing PCs for small businesses to get side money. I started teaching myself to program while I was in High School, and I fell in love with Computer Science. I have always found Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Computing, and Cybersecurity to be interesting topics. Teaching myself new subjects has always been my primary means of learning and that extended to these topics as much as to anything else.
What Makes Me Tick
As part of the larger software engineering ecosystem I contribute heavily to the open source community and share my knowledge through blogging and organizing meetup groups. I am passionate about mentoring the next generation of engineers and helping to create an inclusive culture in engineering teams.
Blog | Github | Twitter | LinkedIN | Medium
Love for the Go Community
In 2017, I was introduced to the Google Go programming language at a security conference hosted by SANS. Ever since it has become the language I do most of my experimentation with. The language itself is easy to read, and the built in concurrency primitives provide a framework for concurrent design that I did not have in other languages. The language was not the only thing that pulled me in though.
In 2018, I attended my first Gophercon conference. I had been to previous conferences in the .NET community where I worked before 2017, but none of them were like this. The Go community was friendly and welcoming and I immediately felt like I fit in. It is a wonderful group of diverse individuals who all love the Go language, but also strive to maintain an inclusive and welcoming culture.
Being part of the Go community has encouraged me to move towards an open source model whenever possible. To be part of and give back to such a great group of people.
Non-Engineering Hobbies
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SCUBA Diving (and teaching SCUBA)
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Bread Making
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Hiking / Camping / Archery
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Collecting Old Books / Reading
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Strategy Board Games (Chess, Axis and Allies, etc…)