Ben Davenport is a Palo Alto–based software engineer and advisor who blends deep systems engineering with product and startup leadership. He co-founded BitGo (CTO) and Beluga (acquired by Facebook) and now advises crypto and venture firms while contributing to mobile platform engineering at Google with a focus on observability, testability, accessibility, and internationalization. An active open-source contributor, he has improved build tooling and developer workflows in projects like Buck, refined clang-format and clang-tools, and hardened crash reporting in Crashpad/Breakpad—work that spans low-level diagnostics, build performance, and iOS UI components. That rare combination of building high-frequency trading models early in his career and securing multi-signature custody for large crypto flows gives him a practical knack for turning complex, high-stakes constraints into reliable production systems.
A fast build system that encourages the creation of small, reusable modules over a variety of platforms and languages.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:2 releases, 636 commits, 2 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben was involved in developing the Buck build system, specifically in improving and extending its capabilities. They focused on enhancing the Apple testing framework by enabling support for running tests, handling file dependencies, and incorporating test-specific features, contributing to a more robust and efficient testing workflow. They also worked on the performance of the build system by optimising parsing of BUCK files and reducing memory consumption of JAR file builds. Further, they enhanced the features of the tool, such as the ability to add directory resources, and a support for different build flavors to ensure consistency.
An extension for Apple's xcodebuild that makes it easier to test iOS and macOS apps.
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Contributions:51 commits, 13 PRs, 17 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the build and test processes for the `xctool` project. Their contributions include adding a new test action that combines build and test steps. They enhanced the build system with options like `-skip-deps` and `-find-target-exclude-paths` to improve build efficiency and flexibility. The user also addressed issues related to test execution, such as handling SDK fallbacks and environment variables, making the testing process more robust.
software-qualityswiftiosios-testxcodebuild
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