Benjamin Zuill-smith
Engineering Director & Partner at GDS Estimating
Escondido, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Zuill-smith is an engineering director and partner who brings 12 years of hands-on full‑stack experience building developer-focused tools, Windows desktop apps, and web platforms for a small, customer-driven company. He leads development at GDS Estimating, where he maintains the core product used by thousands weekly, built internal webapps for licensing and material optimization, and open‑sourced a DXF parser/renderer that has gained notable community traction on GitHub. A pragmatic refactorer and advocate of Agile and TDD, he excels at migrating legacy codebases, training interns, and turning user feedback into deployable features. Deep in .NET and Node.js stacks, he also enjoys JavaScript-centric projects integrating three.js for browser CAD visualization. He combines product-minded engineering with a knack for teaching—having delivered workshops and meetup talks—so he balances shipping reliable systems with growing team capability. Based in Escondido, CA, he pairs technical breadth with a preference for coding over visual front-end design.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa Cruz
English
Stackoverflow
3,633reputation
908kreached
29answers
68questions
java
top-5%
maven
top-5%
Github Skills (14)
threejs10
browserify10
javascript10
browser10
java9
maven9
nodejs9
vb66
css6
svg6
com-interop6
lowercase6
jquery6
attr6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
gdsestimating/dxf-parser
Apr 2015 - Jun 2022
A javascript parser for DXF files. It reads DXF file strings into one large javascript object with more readable properties and a more logical structure.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 120 commits, 34 PRs in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the front-end aspect of the project by adding browserified versions of the code, updating samples for clarity, and modifying the README to reflect browser usage. They also worked on integrating and managing blocks by adding support for parsing block structures and integrating them into the overall structure of the DXF parser. Furthermore, they have made code improvements such as correcting angle calculations and property alignments for various entities.
readablestringsjavascriptpropertiesdxf-files
gdsestimating/three-dxf
Apr 2015 - Feb 2022
A dxf viewer for the browser using three.js
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 68 commits, 12 PRs in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the development of a DXF viewer for the browser, implementing features to visualize and render DXF files. Their work involved integrating the three.js library and implementing essential components, including the ability to parse and draw various entities like circles, lines, polylines, text, and splines. They added support for drawing different geometric primitives from the dxf file and adjusted code for newer three.js versions. The user also integrated the text support, and made some fixes to drawing order of the geometry.
browserdxf-viewerwebglthreejsviewer
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