Ben Hoyt
Software Engineer at Canonical
Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
RockstarBen Hoyt is a software engineer with 16 years of experience based in Christchurch, New Zealand, currently working at Canonical. He combines systems-level C expertise for resource-constrained environments (author of inih) with modern Go engineering—most notably as the author of GoAWK and a contributor to the Go standard library and Juju orchestration. His work spans backend systems, performance tuning, and robustness improvements, including practical fixes that shipped into golang's text and bytes packages and enhancements to cloud SDK resilience. A technical writer as well, he also authored Python's os.scandir() contribution, showing an eye for pragmatic API and performance wins that benefit broad ecosystems. Colleagues rely on him for clear refactors and bug-forging fixes that improve long-running infrastructure projects.
16 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
10,894reputation
2.1mreached
80answers
30questions
decorator
top-5%
logging
top-5%
wildcard
top-1%
glob
top-5%
python
top-1%
pygame
top-5%
Github Skills (50)
algorithm10
parserator10
algorithms10
programming-language10
filesystem10
parser10
python10
wildcard10
testing10
text-manipulation10
c1110
interpreter10
data-structure10
c1710
go10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
benhoyt/inih
Mar 2015 - Jul 2022
Simple .INI file parser in C, good for embedded systems
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:33 releases, 33 reviews, 61 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the functionality and robustness of the C-based INI file parser. Their contributions involved fixing bugs, such as handling edge cases with inline comments and fixing precdence of characters, as well as adding new features, like the ability to parse from streams. The user also made the project more robust by adding compiler directives to mitigate potential security warnings and by adding the ability to reallocate memory for very long lines. The user's work demonstrates a strong understanding of C and its application to embedded systems or similar resource-constrained environments.
embeddedfile-parseriniparserconfigparser
benhoyt/goawk
Jun 2018 - Jan 2023
A POSIX-compliant AWK interpreter written in Go, with CSV support
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:48 releases, 75 reviews, 672 commits in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben made several commits that involved significant changes to the code, adding features and refactoring existing code. They implemented support for multiple `BEGIN`/`END` blocks per the AWK specification and introduced the ability to access variables, including local variables, as well as arrays. The user's work also encompassed code cleanup, improvements to the interpreter's performance and handling of data structures. These contributions helped to refactor, improve and expand the functionality of the AWK interpreter.
awkcsvgointerpreterposix
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