Ben Mcilwain
Staff Software Engineer at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Mcilwain is a Staff Software Engineer based in New York with 12 years of experience building and operating large-scale domain registry systems at Google. He has been a core contributor and tech lead on Nomulus, Google’s open-source top-level domain registry on Google Cloud, where he focused on backend reliability, billing events, and modernizing Java code. His background spans full-stack development, systems operations, and leading engineering teams to run all of Google’s top-level domains. Ben also contributes to the Wikimedia pywikibot project, improving category move workflows and nuanced template handling—evidence of his attention to tooling and edge-case correctness. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic engineering decisions that balance long-term maintainability with operational needs. He pairs a Computer Science degree from University of Maryland with a track record of shipping critical infrastructure and thoughtful open-source improvements.
12 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Maryland, College Park
Github Skills (16)
categories10
cat10
javas10
logging10
mediawiki10
wikimedia10
manage10
python10
back-end-development10
java10
api-client10
regular-expression9
code-optimization9
testing8
data-structure7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
google/nomulus
Mar 2016 - Dec 2022
Top-level domain name registry service on Google Cloud Platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1450 reviews, 911 commits, 518 PRs in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben's commits primarily focused on modifying and maintaining the backend logic of the Nomulus project. Their work involved fixing issues with code assertions, migrating code to use newer Java features, and streamlining logging practices. They also modified the code related to the domain renewal, contact and host data, and the handling of billing events.
appenginegoogle-appservice-registrygcloudapp-engine
wikimedia/pywikibot
Apr 2015 - Sep 2016
A Python library that interfaces with the MediaWiki API. This is a mirror from gerrit.wikimedia.org. Do not submit any patches here. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_account for contributing.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributes to the `pywikibot` library, which interfaces with the MediaWiki API. Their work focuses on improving the category move functionality, including handling special CFD (Categories for discussion) templates and their formatting. They also added the functionality to specify a working page for CFD processes. The user also addressed issues related to edit summaries and fixed template variable issues.
pythonsubmitwikidatawikipediawikia
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