Ben Higdon
Software Engineer at Predictum Inc.
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Higdon is a Software Engineer with 10 years’ experience building reliable systems and data-driven products from Toronto. He combines a strong research background (MSc in Physics and Data Science) with hands-on engineering, having re-architected legacy systems to cut startup time from minutes to seconds and led development of a self-validating statistical modeling platform. A pragmatic full-stack Rust enthusiast, he contributes to prominent open-source projects such as the Seed web framework and the Massa blockchain, focusing on refactors, code quality, and documentation. Ben has a track record of shipping features that directly empower large teams—examples include a custom frontend for 100+ data scientists and CI-driven automatic documentation—and brings an unusual mix of nanoscience lab automation, time-series ML, and web/backend engineering to product problems.
10 years of coding experience
M.Sc., Physics, M.Sc., Physics at University of TorontoHonours B.Sc., Nanoscience, Honours B.Sc., Nanoscience at University of GuelphToronto Metropolitan UniversityUSEQIP, USEQIP at University of Waterloo
English, French
Github Skills (12)
rust10
rust-wasm10
wasm-pack10
blockchain10
serialization9
js-framework9
data-serialization9
webassembly9
frontend9
deserialization9
web-framework9
wasm-bindgen8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
massalabs/massa
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
The Decentralized and Scaled Blockchain
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:283 reviews, 103 commits, 111 PRs in 24 days
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the `massa` blockchain repository by refactoring and renaming core components, specifically related to the testnet. The primary focus was on renaming "Wrapper" related elements to "SecureSend" and updating relevant files such as `block.rs`, to reflect these changes. Furthermore, the user addressed deserialization concerns and added checks, ensuring the integrity of object deserialization. The user's changes involved code modifications within the core models and structures of the blockchain.
dappethereumblockchaindecentralizedblockchain-network
seed-rs/seed
May 2020 - Aug 2020
A Rust framework for creating web apps
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 13 PRs, 66 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `seed-rs/seed` project by adding a counter example to the documentation and linking to the project's website and readme. The user also performed code cleanup by addressing clippy lints, which improved the code quality and maintainability. Further, they removed a builder API and associated support code, indicating significant refactoring effort to simplify the codebase.
rustasmjsfrontend-frameworkframeworkweb-apps
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