Benjamin Woosley
General Partner at Civilization Fund
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Woosley is a multidisciplinary software engineer and founder with 18 years of experience building resilient backend systems, open-source crypto clients, and developer-focused tools. Now based in Austin and investing in long-term civilizational outcomes as General Partner at Civilization Fund while launching impact-driven documentaries through Empact Films, he blends technical craft with mission-oriented ventures. His open-source footprint includes deep contributions to Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Unlimited, PIVX and other notable crypto projects—fixing subtle mempool and wallet race conditions—and steady improvements across prominent Ruby gems and tooling like friendly_id, sunspot, and mongoid. A hands-on builder and former CTO who scaled products through Y Combinator, he pairs low-level C++ protocol work with Rails and front-end experience, and has a track record of making systems simpler, faster, and more testable (e.g., major test-suite and performance wins). He holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from UT Austin and describes himself as an autodidactic polymath—comfortable moving between cryptography, backend engineering, and product-focused initiatives.
18 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Y CombinatorB.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering, B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin
English, French, Spanish
Github Skills (86)
crypto-wallet10
transaction10
python10
ui-components10
testing10
databases10
bitcoins10
ruby10
cryptocurrency10
lxml10
activerecord10
refactoring10
activemodelserializers10
code-optimization10
wallet10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
roo-rb/roo
Mar 2012 - Dec 2017
Roo provides an interface to spreadsheets of several sorts.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:334 commits, 10 PRs, 20 pushes in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily focused on maintaining and improving the `roo-rb/roo` library, which provides an interface to spreadsheets. Their work involved adding dependencies like `iconv` for handling Excel files and refactoring existing code. They also contributed to the transition from Excel2003XML to Nokogiri for better XML parsing, which led to fewer test failures. Finally, the user enabled and disabled tests to improve the overall quality of the project.
xlsxexcelreaderxlssortsroo
peercoin/peercoin
Feb 2018 - Jun 2021
Reference implementation of the Peercoin protocol.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:132 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin's contributions focused on enhancing the robustness and functionality of the Peercoin protocol's reference implementation. Their work included adding tests to address potential RPC errors related to fee requirements and updating error messages for consistency. They also made structural changes, such as consistently including error codes and debug output and ensuring proper use of data structures. Furthermore, the user performed code cleanups such as dropping unused code and code formatting.
proof-of-stakeblockchaindecentralizedminablecryptocurrency
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