Ben Firshman
Founder CEO at Replicate
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Firshman is a founder and CEO with 18 years of experience building developer tools and cloud-native platforms, currently leading Replicate in San Francisco. He created Fig (which became Docker Compose) and led open-source product at Docker, helping ship Docker Machine and Docker Toolbox and coordinating DockerCon—Compose is now an industry standard with hundreds of thousands of Compose files on GitHub. Ben blends product leadership with hands‑on engineering, contributing across Docker/Moby, docker‑py, replicate‑python and Cog while working on backend, devops and frontend code. His background spans building The Guardian’s award‑winning iPad app and early work on GOV.UK (including running its first A/B test), translating editorial design into reliable systems. He still enjoys low‑level problem solving—from optimizing PPU memory in a JavaScript NES emulator to tightening API error handling—and prefers email at b@fir.sh.
18 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, First class honours, BSc, Computer Science, First class honours at University of Warwick
Stackoverflow
63reputation
1kreached
0answers
3questions
Github Skills (111)
apim10
dockerce10
package-management10
python10
testing10
commandline-interface10
command-line-interface10
databases10
erb10
mappings10
ci-cd10
build-automation10
commandline10
dockerfile10
650210
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
arxiv-vanity/arxiv-vanity
Aug 2017 - Jan 2022
Renders papers from arXiv as responsive web pages so you don't have to squint at a PDF.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:455 commits, 202 PRs, 401 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed significantly to the backend functionality of the arXiv Vanity project, focusing on paper scraping and data processing. They implemented a system to download papers from the Arxiv API, parse the results, and insert new papers into a Django database. The contributions also include unit tests for the scraping functionality, and setting up a process to render the papers. This involved modifying project settings, creating database models, and defining management commands for scraping and rendering.
academic-publishingarxivsciencepdflatex
replicate/cog
Mar 2021 - Jan 2023
Containers for machine learning
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:120 reviews, 331 commits, 335 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the project by modifying Docker-related commands and configurations to improve build and execution environments. They added environment variables to Docker commands to ensure proper functionality on different machines. Their work extended to refactoring and modifying the project's server-side codebase, including modifications to configuration files and the implementation of external libraries for tasks such as zip archive handling. The user also introduced improvements to the build process, including the addition of a flag for GPU support.
containerscudapytorchdeep-learningdocker
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