James Bence
Senior Software Engineer at Apple
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Bence is a Senior Software Engineer in Austin with 13 years of professional experience and a deep foundation in mathematics and applied math research. He combines backend engineering in Java and Ruby with strong Unix system administration and DevOps skills, having implemented AWS integrations, Chef automation, Ansible, and production tooling at companies including Apple and Medidata. James has contributed to notable open-source projects such as fog (improving AWS RDS and log handling) and Chef Infra (refining git-provider logic), demonstrating attention to robustness and error handling in cloud services. He’s equally comfortable leading teams and diving into low-level refactors, leveraging a Ph.D.-level analytical background to simplify complex systems and improve reliability. An understated strength is his long-term cross-disciplinary experience—from campus-wide IT leadership to enterprise R&D—bringing pragmatic architecture and operational discipline to large-scale deployments.
13 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San DiegoUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Github Skills (16)
git10
amazon-rds10
automation10
chef-client10
automations10
chef-solo10
error-handling10
api10
rds10
devops10
apidoc10
ruby10
testing9
excon9
deploying9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
fog/fog
Jun 2013 - Nov 2013
The Ruby cloud services library.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the `fog/fog` repository, focusing on the AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) integration. Their work involved refactoring error handling, particularly within AWS services (RDS, ELB, ElastiCache, etc.), to improve the accuracy of error messages. They also made changes to the RDS snapshots functionality, including refactoring the `each` method and implementing features related to log file management, such as the addition of the `describe_db_log_files` and `download_db_logfile_portion` requests.
cloud-servicesrubygemstest-kitchenfogruby
chef/chef
Sep 2014 - Sep 2014
Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 commits in 10 days
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily focus on improvements to the Chef Infra git provider. Their contributions include refactoring code to find and select the shortest git reference, replacing tab indents with spaces, and enhancing the logic for matching remote revisions. They also updated specs related to the git provider. The user's work suggests an effort to refine the functionality and reliability of the git resource within the Chef ecosystem.
devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra
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