Ben Toogood
Founder at getpimento
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstarben-toogood nan is a founder and backend-focused software engineer based in London with a decade of experience building API-first, microservices systems. As a Co-Founder at Hutch and active contributor to the micro/go-micro ecosystem, he has driven core authentication and authorization work—implementing JWTs, refresh tokens, service authentication and access-control rules—to harden service-to-service security. He pairs protocol-first design (protobufs and generated Go bindings) with pragmatic engineering, shipping chat and event-stream features that record message client IDs and support real-time flows. Notably he refactors to remove brittle dependencies and updates plugin stacks, demonstrating a bias for maintainable, production-grade systems. His blend of startup leadership and deep hands-on distributed-systems work makes him fluent at turning API contracts into reliable, secure services.
10 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
469reputation
15kreached
30answers
4questions
Github Skills (24)
authorizations10
protocol-buffers10
user-authentication10
authentication10
microservices-application10
protocol-buffer10
go10
authorization10
jwt10
microservices10
grpc10
api-doc9
event-streaming9
api9
chat9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
micro/micro
Feb 2020 - Feb 2021
An API development platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 reviews, 658 commits, 652 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the core functionality of the "micro" platform, focused on implementing the authentication service, which involved creating the auth package, implementing authentication handlers, and validating account methods. The user refactored code, removing dependencies, and updated the auth version and plugins being used. Their work involved core API implementations within the microservices platform to enhance and maintain the authentication features and capabilities.
apiapi-firstdockercloudcloud-platform
micro/go-micro
Feb 2020 - Sep 2020
A Go microservices framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 361 commits, 451 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben made significant contributions to the authentication and authorization functionality of the go-micro framework. Their work involved implementing the Auth interface, including JWT and service implementations, and adding support for service authentication. The user refactored aspects related to service account management and implemented access control rules. The changes included updates to protocol buffer definitions and the integration of a refresh token mechanism.
golangrpcframeworkdistributed-systemsmicroservices
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