Ben Youngblood
Staff Software Engineer at SmartRent
Gilbert, Arizona, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Youngblood is a Staff Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building reliable, high-concurrency systems and leading engineering teams from startup CTO roles to staff-level ownership at SmartRent. He combines deep backend expertise—demonstrated by notable open-source contributions to the Zend Framework SQL components and ZfcUser authentication module—with a practical focus on usability, testability, and maintainability. Ben has guided teams through architecture, automation, and process improvements while mentoring engineers and driving production-ready results across PHP, Node.js, and distributed stacks. Based in Gilbert, Arizona, he pairs hands-on coding (he jokes about rolling his own crypto) with operational leadership, bringing both technical rigor and a pragmatic, product-oriented mindset.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Arizona
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
use-form10
user-management10
authentication10
php10
user-authentication10
zend-framework10
eforms10
sql10
forms10
input-validation10
data-integration9
sql-database9
unit-testing9
databases9
mvc8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ZF-Commons/ZfcUser
May 2012 - Sep 2012
A generic user registration and authentication module for ZF2. Supports Zend\Db and Doctrine2. (Formerly EdpUser)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily worked on updating and refactoring the ZfcUser module, a user registration and authentication component. Their commits involve migrating the module to use updated Zend Framework components for form handling and input validation. Key contributions include modifying forms for login, registration, and password/email changes. They also ensured compatibility with dependency injection and updated database adapter configurations.
zendzf2phpauthenticationregistration
zendframework/zendframework
Apr 2012 - Sep 2012
Official Zend Framework repository
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the Zend Framework's SQL component, focusing on enhancing its functionality related to SQL queries. Their work included implementing support for table and column aliases within join operations and ensuring correct behavior in `Select` statements. Furthermore, they modified existing tests and created new unit tests to cover the added features and ensure the component's reliability. The user also developed and implemented a Post/Redirect/Get controller plugin.
zendzend-frameworkphpframeworkmodular
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