Ben West
Chief Executive Officer at Nightscout Project
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Top expert inSmart Home Automation and IoT Development
Ben West is a Silicon Valley software and platform engineer with 15 years of experience who now leads Medical Data Networks as CEO, delivering real-time monitoring and Nightscout-as-a-service for intensive insulin patients. A co-founder of the Nightscout Project and former Staff Product Engineer at Dexcom, he blends product engineering, cloud DevOps, and healthcare-focused open-source work to make medical data more actionable and accessible. He spans full-stack development and backend systems, with hands-on contributions to OpenAPS and Nightscout repos—improving core insulin management logic, CI/CD, and user-facing documentation. Comfortable moving between CEO responsibilities and code-level fixes, he has a track record of shipping reliable integrations for medical devices and cloud platforms at scale. Based in San Francisco, he brings entrepreneurial drive, a penchant for ergonomic, reliable systems, and uncommon depth in both technical writing and device-data pipelines.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BA Music Computer Science, BA Music Computer Science at Harding University
Stackoverflow
316reputation
71kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (53)
markdown10
json10
cout10
javascript10
restructuredtext10
python10
apidoc10
sphinx10
command-line-interface10
rs10
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argparse10
markdown-it10
api10
github-pages10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
openaps/openaps
Apr 2015 - Jun 2016
deprecated repo, formerly tools for exploring DIY openaps, but no longer used in current modern OpenAPS builds. see https://openaps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for current build instructions
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:308 commits, 64 PRs, 242 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on developing features for an open-source artificial pancreas system. Their contributions included setting up the project with `setup.py`, stubbing out core package components, and implementing tools like "device" and "report" commands. They demonstrated expertise in architecting the command-line interface and setting up the environment for the different features to interact. There were also modifications to allow a developer to better utilize and contribute to the project, demonstrating a focus on overall project functionality.
openapsbuildsinstructionsdiyreadthedocs
nightscout/share2nightscout-bridge
Mar 2015 - Jan 2023
azure sidecar, bridges Dexcom share2 to Nightscout
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 releases, 100 commits, 31 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily worked on developing and maintaining the back-end logic for bridging Dexcom Share data to Nightscout. Their contributions include implementing authentication, data fetching, and data transformation functionalities. They integrated and configured external APIs for the Nightscout upload and dexcom data fetching. Additionally, the user appears to have worked on deployment and automation aspects by configuring the application to run with environment variables, including settings for intervals and secret keys for the Nightscout upload.
dexcomsidecarnightscoutbridgesazure
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