Jim Benton
Staff Software Engineer at The Chicago Tool Library
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJim Benton is a seasoned software engineer in Chicago with 17 years of experience building backend systems and Rails integrations. He is an active open-source contributor known for work on civic‑tech scrapers (City-Bureau/city-scrapers) and the Ruby geographic library Carmen, where he added region data, retrieval helpers, and Rails form helpers. Jim blends data-focused engineering—adding IDs and geolocation to public meeting scrapers and cleaning up linting/PEP8 warnings—with practical full‑stack sensibilities around i18n and select-helper UX. His niche is making messy government and geographic data reliably consumable by applications and developer tools.
17 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Interactive Multimedia, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Interactive Multimedia at Columbia College Chicago
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
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Github Skills (23)
ruby-rails10
python10
git-repository10
rails10
ruby10
scrapy10
web-scraping10
data-extraction10
rails510
actionview10
github-repos10
ruby-on-rails10
rspec9
country-codes9
co9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
carmen-ruby/carmen-rails
Mar 2012 - Dec 2014
NOT ACTIVELY MAINTAINED Rails adapter for Carmen (provides country_select and subregion_select)
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 3 comments, 2 issues in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Jim contributed to the development of a Rails adapter for Carmen, focusing on form helper methods. Their work involved adding and modifying select tag helpers for countries and subregions. They updated the version and dependencies, and integrated the Rails I18n backend. The user also refactored the code, cleaned up specifications, and improved the sorting of select options.
actively-maintainedrailssubregionrubyadapter
carmen-ruby/carmen
Mar 2009 - Oct 2017
A repository of geographic regions for Ruby
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:308 commits, 17 PRs, 17 pushes in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the development of the `carmen` library, a geographic regions repository for Ruby. They added new features, including the addition of new regions like Canada. Significant effort was devoted to implementing methods for state and country name and code retrieval, along with the introduction of view helpers for use in Rails applications. The commits also included the addition of country code and name retrieval functionalities.
regionsrubyregiongeographic-dataiso3166
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