Hi, I'm Ben. I'm an Associate Engineer at Cantina. I am currently serving as the QA engineer on the Empower project. While Launch Academy, as a coding boot camp, constituted my official initiation into programming, I have since been building applications for several years.

I have a particular interest in the interactive responsiveness of single page applications (SPA), for which I variably utilize Ruby on Rails and Node/Express behind modern frontend frameworks like React. I also have experience with Redux and GraphQL implementations.

When I’m not working, I find inspiration with the students at Resilient Coders. RC is a program that trains people of color for careers in software development.

The only thing I know, is that I know nothing.

Distraught when Netflix changed its rating format, I felt like I lost my catalogue of movies I had seen and rated. Relying on the generosity of the MovieDB API, I have set out to create my own movie site with an emphasis on quickly rating movies and persisting the data to my application's database. I spent four weeks hiking through the Talkeetna Mountains in Alaska.