Ben Reilly is a founder and technology leader with 15 years of experience building production-grade systems that tackle real human and environmental problems, most recently scaling reforestation efforts as CTO of Mast Reforestation. He combines hands-on backend engineering—contributing to notable open-source projects like NetworkX and Django REST Framework—with product and API design, security-minded systems, and high-throughput data ingestion architectures. His background in GIS and environmental resource management informs pragmatic solutions for geospatial interoperability and infrastructure (evident from shapefile and GDAL compatibility work in NetworkX). Early career roles developing utility-grade GIS applications and a POS/compliance system for the cannabis industry demonstrate his ability to deliver mission-critical software across regulated domains. Based in Montreal and fluent in cross-disciplinary collaboration, he mixes startup grit with careful attention to backwards compatibility and testable, maintainable code.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
French Language and Integration, French Language and Integration at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal
Master of Science Environmental Resource Management, Master of Science Environmental Resource Management at Central Washington University
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the shapefile (shp) read and write functionality within the networkx library. Their contributions include bug fixes, attribute handling improvements, and test enhancements, including the introduction of testing for edge attributes in shp export and import. They also addressed issues related to compatibility with older versions of GDAL, suggesting a focus on data interoperability and maintaining backward compatibility. These modifications directly impacted the library's ability to handle geospatial data.
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the implementation of object-level permissions within the Django REST Framework, integrating the django-guardian library. Their work involved adding and modifying code to the permissions module, adding necessary test settings, and writing tests to validate the object-level permissions. They focused on creating a dedicated filter for read list object permissions and removing unnecessary guardian requests, demonstrating a good understanding of the framework's internals and best practices.
apipythondjango-rest-frameworkdjangoweb-apis
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