Booker Bense
Ski Bum at Stealth Startup
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBooker Bense is a seasoned infrastructure and security engineer with 16 years of experience building and hardening large-scale systems across tech and research institutions. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has led security and infrastructure programs at Uber and Instacart, delivering vulnerability management, patching strategies, access controls, and compliance artifacts at scale. His earlier career driving HPC, authentication, and automation at SLAC and Stanford produced widely used contributions—such as pam_krb5 enhancements merged into major Linux distributions—and pragmatic projects like a private "shadow" archive for long-term scientific data access. An active open-source contributor in the Elixir ecosystem, he improved core date/time behavior in the popular timex library and helped evolve Elixir’s filesystem and IEx tooling. Known for turning constrained resources into reliable outcomes (his personal motto), he pairs deep systems expertise with a mathematician’s rigor and a hands-on, get-things-done ethos.
16 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science Applied Mathematics, Master of Science Applied Mathematics at Colorado State UniversityWorcester Polytechnic InstituteB.S Mathematics, B.S Mathematics at University of New Hampshire
Stackoverflow
8,989reputation
641kreached
161answers
0questions
elixir
top-1%
travis-ci
top-5%
Github Skills (22)
datetime10
zone10
filesystem10
elixir10
calendars10
testing10
datetimes10
file-operations10
fileio10
timezone10
travis-ci9
documentation9
git7
internet-explorer7
mercurial6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
elixir-lang/elixir
Sep 2014 - Sep 2015
Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 20 PRs, 54 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Booker primarily contributed to the Elixir language's file system and documentation functionalities. Their work involved implementing and documenting file stat options, including adding the `:read_link` option and `lstat` and `lstat!` functions. They also replaced uses of `:os.cmd` with `System.cmd`, and made enhancements to the IEx helper functions to improve usability, especially regarding module information and formatting.
functional-languagescalablefunctional-programmingelixircompiler
bitwalker/timex
Jan 2015 - Jan 2015
A complete date/time library for Elixir projects.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / QA Engineer
Back-end Developer / QA EngineerContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 9 comments in 11 days
Contributions summary:Booker primarily focused on improving the `timex` library's date and time functionality. They addressed bugs in `to_secs` and other date calculations. Additionally, they worked on the testing suite, adding new tests and correcting existing ones to ensure accurate time zone handling and correct behavior. They also added documentation.
datetimedate-timecalendarelixirtimestamp
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