Benjamin Oakes
Founder at Space Bar Labs
Iowa City, Iowa, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Oakes is a seasoned Ruby on Rails engineer and founder with 16 years of experience building full-stack web applications and leading teams. Based in Iowa City, he progressed from early application development and research roles to senior engineering and tech lead positions at Doximity before launching Space Bar Labs. He’s a pragmatic contributor to open source—helping maintain the Airbrake Ruby client and creating the Maid project to automate filesystem cleanup—demonstrating attention to both production robustness and developer ergonomics. Comfortable across HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Git, and command-line tooling, he blends hands-on coding with product-minded leadership. Outside work he balances entrepreneurship with family life, bringing steady, long-term focus to engineering and team building.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at University of IowaHCHS
Stackoverflow
12,512reputation
4.7mreached
83answers
55questions
ruby
top-5%
Github Skills (24)
monitoring10
ruby-rails10
file-management10
rspec10
rails10
airbrake10
ruby10
error-log10
utilities9
command-line-interface9
develop9
utility9
command-line9
sys9
backend9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
maid/maid
May 2011 - Jul 2021
Be lazy. Let Maid clean up after you, based on rules you define. Think of it as "Hazel for hackers".
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 13 reviews, 689 commits in 10 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the development of the `maid/maid` repository, which aimed to automate file cleanup based on user-defined rules. Contributions included the initial setup of the project with a gem and testing frameworks, the creation of core classes, implementing the rules DSL, and adding utilities for file management such as moving, deleting, and identifying file types. The user also added the introduction of the command-line interface and several new tools.
hazeltest-kitchenthinkcleanruby
airbrake/airbrake
Feb 2012 - Mar 2012
The official Airbrake library for Ruby applications
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits in 7 days
Contributions summary:Benjamin contributed to the Airbrake library, primarily focused on filtering parameters within the Rails application context. They implemented logic to handle parameter filtering based on Rails version, incorporating the `filter_parameters` method for Rails 2 and the `ActionDispatch::Http::ParameterFilter` for Rails 3. The changes included exception handling to prevent unfiltered data, and they also summarized the cases to aid future maintainers. The work was done within the `lib/airbrake/rails/controller_methods.rb` file.
airbrakeruby-applicationcrash-reportingerror-monitoringruby
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