Ben Toogood
Founder at getpimento
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarBen Toogood is a founder and backend engineer with a decade of experience building secure, API-first microservices in Go from Stony Stratford, UK. He has played a central role in implementing authentication and authorization across the widely used micro/micro and go-micro projects, adding JWT, service auth, refresh tokens and access control rules that harden real-world distributed systems. Ben’s contributions include designing protobuf-driven chat and event streaming services and refactoring core platform code to reduce dependencies and improve account validation. Equally comfortable shipping core APIs and deep security plumbing, he blends hands-on engineering with product-minded system design and an open-source-first approach. A detail not everyone sees: his work often sits at the intersection of auth UX and low-level protocol changes, making secure developer experience a practical reality.
10 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
469reputation
15kreached
30answers
4questions
Github Skills (23)
authorizations10
protocol-buffers10
user-authentication10
microservices-application10
authentication10
go10
authorization10
jwt10
microservices10
grpc10
apidoc9
event-streaming9
api9
chat9
csv6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
micro/go-micro
Feb 2020 - Sep 2020
A Go agent harness and service framework
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 361 commits, 451 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben made significant contributions to the authentication and authorization functionality of the go-micro framework. Their work involved implementing the Auth interface, including JWT and service implementations, and adding support for service authentication. The user refactored aspects related to service account management and implemented access control rules. The changes included updates to protocol buffer definitions and the integration of a refresh token mechanism.
gogolangmicroservicesdistributed-systemsai
micro/m3o
Oct 2020 - Feb 2021
A microservices platform
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 45 commits, 33 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the development of a chat service within a microservices architecture. Their primary focus was on defining and implementing the protocol buffer definitions for the chat service, including the `New`, `History`, and `Connect` RPC methods. The user then generated the Go code from the proto definitions, providing the necessary structure for building the chat handler. They also added the functionality to send messages to the event stream and record message client ids.
microservicesm3oservices
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