Ben Kirwin
Member Of Technical Staff at Materialize
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Kirwin is a Member of Technical Staff with 13 years of experience building backend systems, currently working at Materialize in Montreal. He specializes in SQL parsing, planning, and catalog management, contributing to the open-source Materialize project by implementing and refactoring source-related statements like CREATE SOURCE and ALTER SOURCE. Previously a Staff Engineer at Stripe and an early developer at Hopper, he brings production-scale engineering experience across payments and travel tech. Ben holds a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from McGill and combines rigorous engineering discipline with a taste for language-level correctness and developer-facing tooling.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Computer Science, Philosophy, BA, Computer Science, Philosophy at McGill University
Stackoverflow
164reputation
50kreached
1answer
2questions
Github Skills (17)
sql-parser10
postgresql10
sql10
rust10
distributed-systems9
database8
databases8
datastore8
admin7
database-administration7
vector6
functional-programming6
matrix-multiplication6
matrix6
python6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
MaterializeInc/materialize
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
The live data layer for apps and AI agents. Create up-to-the-second views into your business, just using SQL
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1241 reviews, 72 commits, 656 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the backend development of the Materialize project, focusing on the SQL parsing and planning aspects. Their work involved moving and refactoring code related to the `CREATE SOURCE` statement, specifically dealing with options like `REMOTE`, `SIZE`, and `TIMELINE`. They also implemented the `ALTER SOURCE` statement and improved error messages related to catalog items, demonstrating expertise in SQL processing, catalog management, and source configuration.
ai-agentdatalayersqlrustdatabase
bkirwi/folly
May 2021 - Apr 2022
A Z-machine for the reMarkable tablet.
Contributions:3 releases, 152 commits, 1 PR in 11 months
z-machinehandwriting-recognitionremarkable-tabletinteractive-fiction
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