Benjamin Pollack is a Principal Engineer with 16 years of experience building and rescuing startup engineering organizations, currently at ngrok after leading platform efforts at The Knot Worldwide. A true generalist, he's managed managers, written assembly-language desktop code, debugged networked storage performance, and transformed struggling teams into organizational templates for delivery. He pairs hands-on work across React SPAs, build systems and back-end services with hiring, coaching and technical evangelism, and cofounded the Kiln product at Fog Creek. An active open-source contributor, his work spans projects from the Factor language to Shopify's ActiveMerchant and Netflix's Eureka, improving protocols, documentation and payment gateway integrations. Based in Raleigh, NC, he has a track record of turning operational debt into repeatable processes that scale developer velocity.
17 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Duke University
Active Merchant is a simple payment abstraction library extracted from Shopify. The aim of the project is to feel natural to Ruby users and to abstract as many parts as possible away from the user to offer a consistent interface across all supported gateways.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:191 commits, 293 PRs, 336 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily worked on the `active_merchant/active_merchant` repository, contributing to the payment gateway library. Their work involved implementing features for specific payment gateways, particularly focusing on handling extra data requirements for Barclays Smartcard credits and supporting new payment methods, such as Colombia with Ebanx. The user also made modifications to existing code for improved functionality. Furthermore, the user focused on improving the overall maintainability, by introducing improved test suite and code improvements.
Contributions:3 reviews, 46 commits, 42 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the Factor programming language repository by adding documentation and updating existing code. Their work included documenting the `compression.zlib` vocabulary, modernizing the Redis vocabulary to use the latest protocol, and adding documentation for the sequences.extras, math.statistics, and sequences.extras vocabs. The user also made changes to support the use of LibreSSL's libtls library and adapted the OpenSSL calls. Additionally, the user added support for SNI and fixed code.
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