Ben Hess
Engineering Manager at Pregis
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Hess is an Engineering Manager in Milwaukee with 17 years of hands-on experience applying modern software paradigms—OOP, unit testing, and source control—to industrial controls and automation systems. He has progressed from PLC/HMI developer and sysadmin to leading software and electrical engineering teams at Pregis, specializing in Allen-Bradley platforms, SCADA/HMI (Wonderware, FactoryTalk), and drives such as PowerFlex 755. Equally comfortable in controls firmware and backend integration, he has contributed to well-known open-source projects like errbit and thoughtbot/paperclip, improving error reporting and file attachment workflows. Known for bridging field-level troubleshooting with disciplined software practices, he drives reliability across embedded, virtualization, and control-system stacks. His background in industrial engineering and early R&D/tech-support roles gives him a pragmatic, customer-focused approach to delivering maintainable automation solutions.
18 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Industrial Engineering, Industrial Engineering at University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeRufus King High School
Stackoverflow
752reputation
32kreached
12answers
7questions
Github Skills (18)
monitoring10
ruby-rails10
back-end-development10
rspec10
rails10
github-integration10
ruby10
error-log10
minitest10
imagemagick10
unit-test10
documentation9
class-name6
paperclip6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
thoughtbot/paperclip
Aug 2008 - Jul 2009
Easy file attachment management for ActiveRecord
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing file attachment management features within the Paperclip library. Their contributions include adding options for convert commands when generating thumbnails, incorporating testing for these new functionalities, and updating documentation. Furthermore, the user addressed a bug in error handling and fixed a typo in the documentation to ensure code quality and user understanding.
activerecord
errbit/errbit
Dec 2010 - Jun 2011
The open source error catcher that's Airbrake API compliant :ukraine:
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the error-reporting functionality and integration with external services within the errbit/errbit repository. They addressed issues related to authentication, data handling (especially in scenarios lacking requests), and deployment workflows. Their contributions involved modifications to core models, controllers, and view templates, while also enhancing notification mechanisms through backtrace inclusion and GitHub integration.
airbrakerubycrash-reportingerror-monitoring
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