Benjamin Kampmann
Lead Product Engineer at GNUnicorn
Lisbon, Portugal
Summary
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RockstarBenjamin Kampmann is a Lead Product Engineer and seasoned technology leader with 17 years of experience building and scaling software, organisations and communities from Lisbon. He blends hands-on systems engineering—particularly in Rust and backend infrastructure for blockchain and distributed systems—with product and UX sensibilities, having contributed to high-profile projects like Substrate and Polkadot. As a founder and CTO across multiple startups and initiatives (OpenTechSchool, Hackership, Acter, GNUnicorn), he pairs architecture and delivery with mentorship, community-building and technical education. His open-source work spans runtime performance optimisations, static site tooling and developer tooling, showing both deep systems chops and pragmatic UX fixes. Benjamin often volunteers his expertise, favors open-source collaboration, and has a track record of turning complex runtime and storage challenges into practical, testable solutions. Colleagues describe him as a people-first engineer who equally values maintainable code, robust infrastructure and healthy teams.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
German, English, French
Stackoverflow
246reputation
6kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (78)
dependency-management10
statsd10
restructuredtext10
python10
clientside10
plugin-development10
rust-wasm10
sc10
scs10
indexeddb10
web-development10
polkadot10
encryption10
optimization10
javascript10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
rust-lang/arewewebyet
Feb 2016 - Feb 2019
Are we web yet? A simple reckoning of Rust's readiness for Web-related things.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 22 PRs, 62 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily focused on updating the user interface and improving the presentation of information. They modified the layout by making the "last updated" section clearer and added an icon legend to the front page to enhance user understanding. Additionally, the user updated branding and links. This indicates a focus on user experience and presentation within the project.
rust
matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023
Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 405 reviews, 800 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin appears to be a backend developer, contributing to core functionality within the matrix-rust-sdk. The commits involve modifications to the indexeddb store, including the addition of code related to a new room timeline feature and supporting tests for it, indicating work on data storage and retrieval. Further modifications involve encryption key handling and storage mechanisms, pointing towards an expertise in security-related backend development. The user has been further involved in the implementation of the Sliding Sync MSC (Matrix Spec Change), contributing code related to its API.
client-serverrustmatrix-orgsdk
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