I'm Ben, an engineer & founder working on Backyard.ai.

I have been designing and building software on the web for the majority of my life, trying not to allow good to be the enemy of great. I find joy in building products that give people power tools while removing complexity. My open source contributions: GitHub/biw.

I currently live in San Francisco.

Twitter: @biwills

Email: Show email

I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole, learning new things, and playing music.

Other Links

• Big 12 Conference Standings Predictor - A college football standings predictor for the 2024 season.
• gguf.js - A Typescript library to parse metadata of GGML based GGUF files.
• LLM Tethering - Technical deep dive on tethering locally running LLMs to your phone.
• PauseNotes - take notes while watching youtube videos.

Previous Work

• Ideaflow - Worked on a note taking app with Prosemirror.
• PullRequest - Performed code reviews and security audits for startups & fortune 500 companies.
• AuxParty - An immersive 3D social music experience. Scaled the product to 50 countries worldwide with millions of songs listened to collectively and got a chance to put on events with over a dozen artists/producers before shutting down.
• Shone working on autonomous technologies for container ships.
• Aero working on rethinking business travel (They have since pivoted)
• Masterclass working on growth & engineering tooling
• Microsoft as an Intern, working on Windows kernel security
• Tensentric as an Intern, working on medical device security