Benjamin Chan
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Chan is a systems-focused software engineer with 13 years of experience bridging distributed consensus and Transformer pre-training research. He designed simple, high-performance consensus protocols (Simplex, Streamlet) that are taught at top universities and deployed in production across projects like Solana and Algorand, where he has directly improved core consensus and SDK stability. With an MIT BS and MEng in Computer Science and Systems, he combines rigorous academic training with hands-on backend work—contributions to Algorand include deterministic agreement tests, vote-filter refactors, and multisig support in the JS SDK. Based in San Francisco, he thrives on making complex protocols practical and debuggable, and runs a technical site at spilled.coffee that surfaces his thinking. Notably, his background spans both low-level distributed algorithms and mid-scale Transformer pre-training, enabling cross-domain insight into scalable, reliable systems.
13 years of coding experience
Bellarmine College PreparatoryBachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
5,579reputation
249kreached
88answers
32questions
objective-c
top-5%
macos
top-5%
cocoa
top-5%
Github Skills (31)
algorithm10
algorithms10
consensus10
javascript10
testing10
multisig10
data-structure10
algorand10
go10
sdk10
blockchain10
data-structures10
objective-c9
network-programming9
cocoa9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
algorand/go-algorand
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019
Algorand's official implementation in Go.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 64 PRs, 24 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily focused on fixing and improving the stability of the Algorand consensus algorithm. Their contributions included making agreement tests deterministic, refactoring vote filtering logic to align with the specification, and enhancing the network layer. Additionally, the user addressed code linting issues and refactored an e2e rewards test. Their work involved debugging and improving the core functionality of the Algorand blockchain implementation in Go.
golangblockchainalgorand
algorand/js-algorand-sdk
May 2019 - May 2019
The official JavaScript SDK for Algorand.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 8 pushes in 15 days
Contributions summary:Benjamin contributed significantly to the Algorand JavaScript SDK by adding and refining multisig transaction support. This involved the creation of functions for signing, appending signatures, and merging multisig transactions. Further contributions included support for signing key registration and non-payment type transactions. These changes improved the SDK's capabilities for complex transactions on the Algorand blockchain.
browserblockstackethereumjavascriptblockchain
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