Ben Smith
Software Engineer at VoxRay Games
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Smith is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience building systems that span games, browsers, and WebAssembly toolchains, now based in Oakland, CA. He led WebAssembly standardization efforts at Google—chairing the community group and shepherding features like Bulk Memory, SIMD, threads, and GC into the spec—while also maintaining foundational tooling such as wabt. His background includes shipped game engineering at Blizzard and EA and low-level runtime work across Chrome, V8, and NaCl, giving him a rare mix of systems, compiler, and game-dev expertise. As an active open-source contributor he’s implemented emulator rendering, added Wasm tests to web-platform-tests, and contributed game examples and CLI tooling to wasm4, demonstrating both tooling and creative tinkering. Ben is comfortable moving between specification writing, reference implementations, and production compilers, and often pairs deep protocol knowledge with pragmatic engineering to turn standards into ship-ready features. Outside of work he still builds small retro game projects—something he notes you won’t necessarily find in his main repos.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Oregon
Github Skills (37)
javascript10
c-language10
sdl10
testing10
binary-format10
lexical-analysis10
gameboy10
webassembly10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
emulation10
documentation10
test-automation10
data-structure9
code-generation9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
WebAssembly/wabt
Aug 2015 - Aug 2022
The WebAssembly Binary Toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 75 reviews, 1409 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:Ben's commits focus on updating the WebAssembly Binary Toolkit, specifically by implementing improvements in code robustness and functionality. The contributions involve refactoring existing code, enhancing the text format, and adding support for new features, such as incorporating SIMD instructions and multi-value functionality. The user's work spans various areas including compiler toolchain, code generation, text format parsing, and performance optimization.
webassembly
binji/pokegb
May 2021 - Oct 2021
A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokemon Blue, in ~50 lines of c++.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:50 commits, 2 PRs, 19 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed significantly to implementing core features of a Game Boy emulator. Their work included implementing the rendering engine, adding sprite support, and integrating keyboard input for user interaction. Furthermore, the user addressed an MBC3 ROM mapping issue and implemented additional CPU instructions, demonstrating a solid understanding of the emulator's underlying logic and the Game Boy's hardware.
cppgameboyemulatorobfuscated
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