Ben Dicken
Head Of Developer Education
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Dicken is a Head of Developer Education with 12 years of experience translating systems- and database-level engineering into practical learning for developers. Currently leading developer education at PlanetScale, he teaches and builds curricula around Vitess, MySQL, Postgres, and cloud database infrastructure while shaping how engineers adopt scalable data platforms. His background blends academic teaching—senior lecturer roles designing courses from intro Python to operating systems—with hands-on research software engineering that used LLVM, Intel Pin, and query-runtime analysis to improve DBMS performance. That mix of classroom pedagogy and low-level systems work makes him adept at explaining complex internals in actionable terms for practitioners. He holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and maintains a public technical presence (benjdd.com) focused on databases.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Arizona
Github Skills (71)
clustering10
pygame10
project-management9
database9
atom-editor9
svg9
visualization9
mysql9
kubernetes9
vue9
vitess9
data-visualization8
pyodide8
charts8
gdb8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
bddicken/lego-vis
Mar 2015 - Dec 2017
Contributions:57 commits, 14 PRs, 66 pushes in 2 years 10 months
bddicken/UACSCourseGraph
May 2017 - Jul 2022
Contributions:4 PRs, 26 pushes, 2 branches in 5 years 3 months
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