Ben Postlethwaite
VP Of Engineering at Plotly
Area C (Cobble Hill), British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Postlethwaite is a seasoned engineering leader with 14 years of experience shaping product and customer-facing teams at Plotly, now serving as VP of Engineering. He blends hands-on front-end expertise—contributing UI and UX improvements to notable open-source projects like Plotly/Dash and plotly.js—with a strategic track record across roles from Director to Chief Customer Officer. Ben emphasizes principled leadership: clear direction, accountability for mistakes, high standards for quality over speed, and collaborative, low‑bureaucracy teams. A former geophysicist with an MS from UBC, he brings analytical rigor and a scientific mindset to building data‑driven developer tools and dashboards. Notably, his open-source work improved interactive plotting and data app components used widely in the data visualization community.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Geophysics and Seismology, Master of Science - MS, Geophysics and Seismology at The University of British Columbia
Github Skills (27)
data-visualizations10
plotly-dash10
javascript10
charts10
data-visualisation10
ui-design10
chartjs10
charting10
uid10
svg10
front-end-development10
dashjs10
data-visualization10
d3js10
react10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
plotly/plotly.js
Oct 2013 - Apr 2018
Open-source JavaScript charting library behind Plotly and Dash
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:864 commits, 6 PRs, 12 pushes in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to fixing colorbar fonts, improving the presentation of heatmaps, and integrating 3D aspects into the plotting library. They also addressed issues in rendering text elements and improved the handling of axis labels within the charting interface. Additionally, the user made UI improvements around the positioning of the 3D plots.
chartsdashcharting-librarychartwebgl
plotly/react-plotly.js
Nov 2017 - Jan 2018
A plotly.js React component from Plotly 📈
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 9 PRs, 9 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the React component for Plotly. Their contributions included bug fixes related to event handlers and plot updates. They also improved the codebase through prettifying and adding a hook for purging. Furthermore, the user worked on component updates and responsive features, as well as revisioning counter implementation.
react-componentreactcharting-librarychartreact-js
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