Ben Slavin is a serial entrepreneur and technical leader with 16 years of experience building high-performance web platforms, agencies, and product teams. As Co-Founder of FreeSkate and Managing Director of Superscalar, he blends hands-on engineering with strategic consulting to help growth-stage companies choose and execute pragmatic technology and AI/data solutions. He has repeatedly scaled teams and businesses—bootstrapping Chalk + Chisel to $1M ARR and growing Mindgrub’s Agency and Consulting practices to roughly $25M in revenue with 120+ people. His work spans low-latency distributed systems (Erlang-based caching at Heliograph), agency-scale interactive experiences (VR/AR projects for Nike and Discovery), and enterprise engagements for clients like NASA, Nike, and Booz Allen Hamilton. An active contributor to open-source Python/Django tooling, he improved the django-activity-stream library’s GFK handling and import mechanics, reflecting a knack for fixing subtle backend edge cases. With an MBA in Strategy, Technology and Entrepreneurship and a background in computer engineering, he combines product sensibility, design-driven leadership, and deep technical craft.
16 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
MBA Strategy Technology and Entrepreneurship, MBA Strategy Technology and Entrepreneurship at University of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School of Business
BSE Computer Engineering, BSE Computer Engineering at University of Pittsburgh
Generate generic activity streams from the actions on your site. Users can follow any actors' activities for personalized streams.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:6 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the Django-based activity stream library. Their contributions included adding a configuration parameter to control Generic Foreign Key (GFK) fetch depth and converting a manager to use GFK. The user also addressed issues related to null object references within GFK implementations and corrected corrupted values. Furthermore, the user implemented functionality for importing models via a class-prepared listener, improving the system's ability to accommodate models.
Ability to specify prefixes for database table names in Django on a global, per-app, or per-model basis.
Contributions:3 commits, 3 PRs, 1 push in 8 years 7 months
pythondjangoprefixesabilityspecify
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.