Ben Straub
Senior Staff Engineer at Zendesk
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Straub is a Senior Staff Engineer in Portland, Oregon with 17 years of experience building backend systems, developer tooling, and integrations that people actually use. He combines deep systems-level knowledge from work on libgit2 and Objective-C bindings with product-minded engineering at Zendesk and GitHub, and is the author/contributor to the widely used Pro Git book. His contributions span implementing git revparse support, cloning/revert features, and a Slack-integrated deployment workflow for Samson—demonstrating both low-level protocol work and pragmatic application integration. Comfortable across front-end, back-end, and ops, he has a track record of modernizing legacy apps and shipping robust APIs and automation. Ben prefers meaningful work that improves the world, pairing technical rigor with clear technical writing and mentorship.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Computer Engineering at Oregon State UniversityMSE, Software Engineering, MSE, Software Engineering at Portland State University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
64reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (31)
textbook10
objective-c10
ruby-rails10
git10
libgit210
asciidoc10
storybook10
testing10
net10
dotnet10
rails10
ruby10
asp-net10
libgit2sharp10
docbook10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
progit/progit2
Jan 2014 - Jan 2023
Pro Git 2nd Edition
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:292 releases, 81 reviews, 1122 commits in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben appears to be contributing to the second edition of the "Pro Git" book. Their commits primarily involve merging changes from the main branch into various chapter branches, indicating a role in integrating updates and resolving conflicts. They are also involved in minor changes to the book's cover, suggesting a focus on content maintenance and organization. Overall, the work reflects an effort to maintain the book's structure and incorporate external changes.
asciidocpro-gitgitlab
libgit2/libgit2sharp
Aug 2012 - Feb 2014
Git + .NET = ❤
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the `libgit2sharp` library by adding support for revparse specifications within the `Repository.Lookup` method. They refactored code to integrate the `git_revparse_single` function for object lookups, increasing the library's capabilities. Further contributions involved improving the library's functionality by incorporating and testing clone and revert capabilities. These additions suggest improvements in the underlying git operations.
dotnetversion-controllibgit2monogit-gui
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