Ben Watson
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Sammamish, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarBen Watson is a Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience designing and optimizing large-scale query distribution and workflow platforms for Bing, Cortana, Office, and Windows at Microsoft. Based in Sammamish, WA, he focuses on backend performance and maintainability, demonstrated by contributions to the well-regarded Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream library where he refactored core classes, added safer buffer accessors, and extended async copy functionality. He combines hands-on coding with system-level thinking to improve throughput and reliability across distributed services. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic solutions that reduce operational overhead while enabling new platform capabilities.
11 years of coding experience
Italian
Stackoverflow
56reputation
3kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (9)
net10
asp-net10
memory-management10
dotnet10
csharp10
dotnet-core10
unit-testing9
api-design8
testing6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream
Feb 2015 - Aug 2022
A library to provide pooling for .NET MemoryStream objects to improve application performance.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 releases, 60 reviews, 59 commits in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on refactoring the `RecyclableMemoryStream` class. Their contributions involved cleaning up comments and adding XML documentation, which improved code readability and maintainability. They also implemented the `TryGetBuffer` method and addressed a bug related to bounds checking. Furthermore, they added new methods like WriteTo and CopyToAsync that extended the functionality and capabilities of the library.
dotnetpoolingperformancecsharpmemorystream
benmwatson/peloton-to-garmin
Jan 2023 - Mar 2025
Convert workout data from Peloton into JSON/TCX/FIT files and automatically upload to Garmin Connect
Contributions:4 PRs, 13 pushes in 2 years 2 months
convert-workout-datapelotongarmingarmin-connectfit
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