Ben Hughes
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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RockstarBen Hughes is a seasoned software engineer in New York with 17 years of experience building scalable backend and infrastructure systems and is currently at Notion. He has led large technical efforts—rearchitecting ML‑powered customer service ingresses at Amazon and driving Kubernetes compute strategy at Airbnb, including a multicluster scaling design and cluster autoscaling rollout that cut Kubernetes costs by a third. Ben pairs deep systems chops with hands‑on performance work, contributing to open‑source projects like Luxon, Hypernova, Synapse and Storm where he optimized date parsing, improved server-side rendering reliability, and implemented DNS/Zookeeper service watchers. He co‑founded NabeWise (acquired by Airbnb) and balances leadership and communication with a pragmatic engineering credo he sums up as “I write emails and read code.”
18 years of coding experience
Github Skills (50)
date-time10
algorithms10
datetime10
filesystem10
javascript10
node-js10
apache-storm10
clojure-cli10
testing10
file-systems10
server-side-rendering10
persistent-data10
distributed-systems10
data-persistence10
date-format10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
airbnb/hypernova
Jan 2018 - May 2018
A service for server-side rendering your JavaScript views
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 11 PRs, 18 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the server-side rendering service. They refactored the job processing logic, changing it from concurrent to serial execution, and introduced configuration options to control job processing style. The user also added functionality related to server lifecycle management, including shutdown procedures and error handling, and modified the server configuration to support different listening arrangements. These changes aimed to enhance the service's reliability and flexibility.
renderingserver-side-renderingjavascriptserver-side
airbnb/synapse
May 2013 - May 2014
A transparent service discovery framework for connecting an SOA
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 3 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the development of a service discovery framework, specifically focusing on implementing a DNS-based service watcher. They added the `DnsWatcher` and `ZookeeperDnsWatcher` components, enabling the system to dynamically discover and reconfigure services based on DNS records and Zookeeper data. Their work involved resolving hostnames, managing backend configurations, and integrating with Zookeeper to support dynamic service discovery updates. They also made some minor adjustments to the overall project by bumping the version to 0.1.4 and addressing comments from a pull request.
soatransparentservice-discoverydiscovery
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