Ben Firshman
Member Of Technical Staff at Anthropic
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Firshman is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with 18 years building developer tools, container infrastructure, and ML platforms from idea to production. Based in San Francisco, he founded Replicate and previously led product at Docker, where he helped create Docker Compose and other widely used tooling, and more recently served in senior AI platform roles. He combines deep backend and DevOps expertise (Docker, Machine, cog, docker-py) with full-stack work on projects like arXiv Vanity and a JS NES emulator, showing fluency across systems, APIs, and responsive frontends. Ben is a prolific open-source contributor who has implemented core clients, improved scraping/rendering pipelines, and optimized performance-critical code in multiple ecosystems. Comfortable as both founder and individual contributor, he accelerates projects by bridging product, engineering, and developer experience. He prefers email contact (ben@firshman.com) and maintains a public portfolio at firshman.com.
19 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at University of Warwick
Stackoverflow
63reputation
1kreached
0answers
3questions
Github Skills (95)
apim10
python10
package-management10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
erb10
mappings10
build-automation10
dockerfile10
650210
web-development10
emulation10
ruby-on-rails10
flask10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
arxiv-vanity/engrafo
Jul 2017 - Apr 2022
Convert LaTeX documents into beautiful responsive web pages using LaTeXML.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:668 commits, 456 PRs, 701 pushes in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ben's primary contribution was to refactor and enhance the functionality of the engrafo project, a LaTeX to web page converter. They added features such as support for display math, improved table and figure rendering, and improved bibliography support, requiring modifications to both the rendering and the presentation layers. The user also worked on improving the user interface and mobile responsiveness of the output pages by adding CSS styles, handling of math formulas, and making various layout adjustments, suggesting involvement in front-end development tasks. They also worked on build and development server setup to speed up the project.
latexlatexmlacademic-publishingsciencearxiv
arxiv-vanity/arxiv-vanity
Aug 2017 - Jan 2022
Renders papers from arXiv as responsive web pages so you don't have to squint at a PDF.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:455 commits, 202 PRs, 401 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed significantly to the backend functionality of the arXiv Vanity project, focusing on paper scraping and data processing. They implemented a system to download papers from the Arxiv API, parse the results, and insert new papers into a Django database. The contributions also include unit tests for the scraping functionality, and setting up a process to render the papers. This involved modifying project settings, creating database models, and defining management commands for scraping and rendering.
pdflatexacademic-publishingsciencearxiv
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