Ben Kraft
Research Planner at Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission
Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Kraft is an applied researcher and research planner with 13 years of experience translating messy regional economic, land use, housing, and zoning data into actionable analysis for policymakers and the public. Based in Silver Spring, Maryland, he combines rigorous academic training (PhD, Georgia Tech) and field-tested planning practice at the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission to inform county-to-subnational economic development decisions. Comfortable with "data science" that is really careful statistics on imperfect datasets, he focuses on fiscal implications and the tradeoffs between zero-sum and positive-sum policy environments. His work bridges scholarship—co-authoring studies on robotics and regional economic resilience—with hands-on planning tasks that shape local outcomes. He has contributed to open-source tooling for type-safe GraphQL clients in Go, reflecting a pragmatic fluency with backend code and reproducible analysis pipelines. Colleagues rely on him to make complex, politically fraught choices clearer by framing options as explicit tradeoffs rather than definitive answers.
13 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Urban Planning, Master's degree, Urban Planning at University of MichiganDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, City/Urban, Community and Regional Planning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, City/Urban, Community and Regional Planning at Georgia Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Arts (B.A.), English Language and Literature/Letters, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), English Language and Literature/Letters at The College of New JerseyMaster of Arts (M.A.), Humanities, Master of Arts (M.A.), Humanities at University of Chicago
Github Skills (11)
graphql10
json10
code-templates10
apptemplates10
code-generation10
go10
cpp-templates10
html-template10
python-templates10
wordpress-graphql10
wpgraphql10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
Khan/genqlient
Dec 2019 - Dec 2022
a truly type-safe Go GraphQL client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 125 reviews, 240 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the development of a Go GraphQL client, focused on implementing core features such as struct-based queries and request/response handling. Their work included defining structures for queries, building a request mechanism, and integrating type-safety into the client's operation. The user implemented the core functionalities for code generation using go templates.
golanggraphql-clientcodegentype-safegraphql-go
benjaminjkraft/junk
Aug 2014 - Nov 2021
Repo of random junk, experiments, stuff that isn't anything (yet).
Contributions:71 commits, 46 pushes in 7 years 3 months
shamir-secret-sharingjunkoptimizations
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