Ben Isaacs
Backend Engineering Lead at Mixcloud
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Isaacs is a seasoned backend engineering leader with 16 years building and scaling high‑traffic web platforms, currently leading backend engineering at Mixcloud after senior leadership roles at Last.fm. He combines hands‑on PHP and architecture expertise with pragmatic Scrum/Agile leadership to keep teams productive and focused on measurable outcomes. Ben is an active open‑source contributor — from improving media metadata parsing in getID3 to low‑level AVR optimizations in the popular FastLED project — reflecting a knack for both web-scale services and embedded performance. Based in London, he pairs a first‑class Computer Science degree with a rare blend of product‑aware engineering and stage‑ready performance experience as a musician, which informs his collaborative, audience-centric approach to building systems.
16 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
The Latymer SchoolBSc (1st class), Computer Science, BSc (1st class), Computer Science at Queen Mary, U. of London
Stackoverflow
1,159reputation
51kreached
20answers
1question
dockerfile
top-5%
docker
top-5%
ubuntu
top-5%
Github Skills (34)
c-language10
controller10
metadata10
microcontroller10
file-parsing10
led-controller10
avr10
php10
sys10
embedded10
cprogramming-language10
fastled10
optimization10
mp39
ubuntu9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
JamesHeinrich/getID3
Dec 2019 - Apr 2022
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 8 PRs, 14 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and robustness of the `getid3` library. Their contributions included fixing a bug related to array access in the MP3 module, adding an option to control HTML tag generation, and updating the demos to utilize the instance method for tag copying. They also addressed potential errors in QuickTime parsing and TIFF file handling, and improved ID3v1 detection. The user further implemented security improvements by defining options to suppress warnings generated by invalid iXML content.
FastLED/FastLED
Jul 2021 - Jan 2022
The FastLED library for colored LED animation on Arduino. Please direct questions/requests for help to the FastLED Reddit community: http://fastled.io/r We'd like to use github "issues" just for tracking library bugs / enhancements.
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 11 PRs, 27 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `FastLED` library, focusing on optimizations and improvements for specific hardware platforms, particularly the AVR microcontrollers. The user's work included addressing potential bugs related to pixel array handling and implementing features like reverse pixel display. Additionally, the user made performance enhancements, optimizing the `blend8` function for AVR architecture. Furthermore, the user refactored the code and added helpful warning messages.
animationledfastled-librarycoloredfastled
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