✨ Series: Getting to know the wonderful Continuous Delivery Community
Ben Powell
Pronouns: he/him
Location: Austin, Texas
Who are you?
A software engineer at Apple working on Spinnaker and CDEvents. I have about a decade worth of experience in software but have been programming since I was a wee lad. I grew up in Vegas which is not exactly a tech hub, but found my love of tech early on in life.
What are your hobbies?
Video games and reading. I enjoy reading a lot of various things on various topics. Mostly tech related, but not limited to. I enjoy training my new puppy in my free time and just spending time with him.
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
As a kid, I had two phases: skateboarding and programming. I wanted to be a professional skater, but somehow fell more in love with computers.
What led you to a career in tech?
Honestly, I really did not know I wanted to be a software engineer. I was thinking maybe physics or philosophy at early points of college, but ended up doing software cause that’s where my heart was at. I just love computer science.
When I was attending UNLV, I ended up in a grad class as an undergrad, and was eventually scouted to join a company by another student. That began my life as a software engineer.
Do you remember your first open source contribution?
My very first source contribution was pretty unimpressive, but it was for a language my professor was writing in my college days. However, I think my first contribution that was widely used was updating the AWS SDK for Go’s documentation comments in the code generator.
How did you get involved in the Continuous Delivery Foundation?
I was at a conference in Austin, cdCon, and I was speaking with Andrea Frittoli about the limitations of the current approach and some ways to improve it. I decided to hop on to the working group for CDEvents, and see where I could help push the new idea.
What is your favorite thing/project/tech to work on?
There are a few areas of software that I really love to work on:
- Emulator/Virtual Machines – In college, I had a lot of fun writing a 6502 emulator, which is the processor for NES (Nintendo Entertainment System).
- Compilers and languages – Written a few compilers for fun. Both LL and LALR parsers.
- I love making things efficient – So taking a piece of a code and making it go fast or more memory optimized.
Tell us about the thing you’re most proud of and why?
I have always tried to have cross organizational impact, but a couple years ago was the first time where I saw cross company impact. I implemented a feature in Spinnaker called the artifact storage which utilizes references to artifacts instead of embedding the raw artifacts in the JSON responses which we saw reductions as large as 80% to the payload.
What is the best connection you’ve made through open source?
Folks from the CDF! Shout out to Andrea. I believe Andrea and the people at CDEvents are doing something that will truly disrupt the CI/CD space.
What is your #1 top tip for getting involved in the community?
Open source can be a very daunting place especially for new engineers. I remember wanting to get into open source when I was really young, but had no idea on how to do so. As engineers we always want our contributions to be massive and meaningful, but I would say that is a good mindset to have, but it is always best to start small within a community you want to contribute to.
For me, always look at what is confusing in documentation. A lot of the time documentation gets missed or not the love that it needs, but as new engineers on the project, you are the target audience for these docs. So if you find something confusing or could be worded better, open a GitHub issue, or submit a pull request implementing the clarification.
Another great way to get involved is SIG or special interest groups. Some folks call them WG or working groups, but they are the same thing. A lot of open source communities have public calendars where they meet on some periodic interval via some call like zoom, for example. That may be once a week, a month, etc. Anyone is welcomed at these meetings and as open source maintainers, it is always fantastic to see new faces showing interest in our projects.
What’s your favourite open source conference?
GopherCon is one of my all time favorites. I have been to it maybe 6 or 7 times. I was an early adopter of Golang (v1.1?), and have used it for various personal projects and spent a good portion of my career using it.
Where can we find you?
More from Ben
In 2024, Ben was elected as one of the new CD Foundation Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) representatives and he was recently on the panel of our Techstrong.TV series The CD Pipeline, chatting about CDEvents. Watch it here
