Avatar of Carl D. Benson
Carl D. Benson
A decade of experience, a desire to define and constrain problems, and a love of building systems to solve those problems.
Languages
Kotlin, Java, Python, Typescript, JavaScript, Rust, C#, Swift, Objective-C, Dart, Groovy
AWS
S3, ECS, RDS, EC2, Fargate, ECR, CloudWatch, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Neptune, Route 53, CloudFront, Elasticsearch Service, AmazonMQ, AppSync, Cognito
Java/JVM
Gradle, JUnit, Spring 5, Spring Boot 2.0+, Spring Web, Spring Batch, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Axon, Flyway, Kotest, MockK, Mockito, Lombok
Tools
Git, IntelliJ, Android Studio, Xcode, PyCharm, VS Code, DataGrip, Postman, Jira, Trello, Kanban Flow, Asana, Notion, Confluence, MediaWiki, GitLab, BitBucket, GitHub, Slack
Databases/Data Sources
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Neptune, DB2, Oracle, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Redis
The Rest
Pulumi, React, React Native, Flutter, Hasura, Agile, Event Sourcing, RESTful Services, Dependency Injection, Test Driven Development
Brave Care
Senior Backend Engineer III
May 2022 - May 2023

Migrated authentication from Auth0 to Cognito with minimal interruption to users and substantial cost-savings to the company.

Created internal tooling to aid in local development, specifically around Lambda's invoked directly from AWS (e.g. Cognito).

Redesigned and rewrote the scheduling algorithms with reliability and flexibility in mind.

Arccos Golf
Software Architect
Aug 2020 - May 2022

Built a scalable event-based platform that processes thousands of pieces of data collected during the course of a game of golf for thousands of people every day.

Integrated with ML models made by the data science team to implement a "smart distances" formula that determines how far a player should expect to hit with each of their clubs.

Migrated from ECS to Serverless in an effort to improve performance, scalability, and reliability for core systems resulting in substantially improved uptime.

Foodsby
Staff Software Engineer
May 2018 - July 2020

Led effort to transition to an event-driven architecture using ActiveMQ for intra- and inter-service asynchronous communication.

Designed, built, and maintained a scalable system to support user-based customizations in the tens of thousands of emails that get sent daily.

Planned and executed integrations with third-party email and tax filing providers.

Led effort to introduce event sourcing using Axon for better historical tracking.

Maintained a legacy ASP.NET monolith and Groovy microservices after introducing Kotlin, which became the primary language for our microservices.

Boothcast
Co-founder, CTO
April 2018 - June 2020

Co-founded a company for people to live-stream audio commentary over a sporting event.

Led technical decision making and technical work, performed tech support for streamers, managed streamer schedules, and managed contractors.

Built a backend in Spring Boot and Kotlin that supported authentication, tipping, and scheduled streams.

Built and managed AWS infrastructure to host the backend using Fargate, RDS, S3, EC2, Route53, CloudFront, and others.

Built a cross-platform mobile application using Flutter with audio streaming, in-app purchases, and chat as well as a web dashboard for streamers.

Daugherty Business Solutions
Software Engineer III / Senior Consultant
August 2017 - May 2018
Software Engineer III / Consultant
March 2017 - August 2017
Software Engineer II / Consultant
March 2016 - March 2017

Created a prescription drug monitoring program with microservice architecture using Spring Boot, Knockout.js, and Postgres.

Maintained and added features to a legacy codebase written in Java using the GWT UI framework.

Created small cross-platform mobile app in Xamarin which sparked the client's interest in pursuing further mobile work.

Built a prototype of product catalog with searchable documents and product categorization using Vue, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Elasticsearch, and Postgres.

Managed multiple other engineers and aided them in personal and professional growth.

Code42
Software Engineer
April 2015 - March 2016
Jr. iOS / OS X Developer
Oct 2013 - April 2015

Invented method of detecting browser file uploads by leveraging existing technology.

Assumed all feature and maintenance work of core application engine which was responsible for generating and receiving file change events within a peer-to-peer network.

Optimized macOS and iOS endpoint engines using Apple's performance monitoring software.

Refactored particularly bug-prone and difficult-to-debug areas of the legacy Java file storage engine.

Innovative Computer Software
App Developer
June 2012 - Oct 2013

Began implementation on an iOS app for Great Clips that consumed a RESTful web service.

Contributed to the Great Clips app for Android by updating the Google Maps integration.

Education
Augsburg College
Sept 2008 - May 2012

Bachelors of Science in Physics

Bachelors of Science in Mathematics

Physics Honor Society - Sigma Pi Sigma