Benjamin Simmonds
Software Engineer at Microsoft
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Simmonds is a software engineer at Microsoft with seven years of experience building developer tooling, currently contributing to Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. An ETH Zürich alumnus in Secure and Reliable Systems, he blends front-end UX work on VS Code’s editor and tab UI with full‑stack contributions to the popular vscode-pull-request-github extension—adding features like milestone management, suggested assignees, and review-thread comment resolution. He’s also worked on backend code-generation and sourcemap robustness for the DaCe data-centric parallel programming project, showing strength in bridging Python and C++ build artifacts. Comfortable across CI/testing, editor ergonomics, and language-tooling, he focuses on improving developer workflows and observable mappings between source and generated code.
7 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Science, Secure and Reliable Systems, Master's degree, Computer Science, Secure and Reliable Systems at ETH ZürichMatriculation, Economics & Law, Matriculation, Economics & Law at Kantonsschule Enge, Zürich
English, German, French
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
c-language10
github10
python10
typescript10
cluster-computing10
vscode-extension10
ui-design10
code-review10
uid10
parallel-computing10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
pullrequest10
typescripts10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/vscode
Aug 2022 - Sep 2022
Visual Studio Code
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 771 reviews, 63 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the UI of the Visual Studio Code editor, making changes to the tab bar and context menus for editor controls. They implemented features to show and configure tabs with the related menu configurations. In addition, the user's work involved modifying the source code to improve the overall usability of the editor tab features.
visual-studio-codeelectronvscodevscode-extensionmicrosoft
microsoft/vscode-pull-request-github
Jul 2022 - Sep 2022
GitHub Pull Requests for Visual Studio Code
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:98 reviews, 27 commits, 49 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the development of the Visual Studio Code GitHub Pull Requests extension. Their work included implementing and enhancing features related to pull request overviews, including milestone management and suggested assignees. They also made significant contributions to the user interface and front-end aspects by integrating GitHub label colors and refining the display of file changes. Further work included adding support for resolving and unresolving comments in review threads and integrating with notifications features.
visual-studio-codevscodevscode-extensionpull-requestsvisual-studio
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