Jim Benton
Staff Software Engineer at The Chicago Tool Library
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJim Benton is a Staff Software Engineer in Chicago with 18 years of experience building reliable web systems and mentoring teams across startups and large organizations. He blends deep Ruby/Rails expertise and backend scraping work with leadership roles at Discord, Truss, and as co-founder/tech lead of the Chicago Tool Library, demonstrating both product focus and community-minded engineering. An active open-source contributor, Jim has improved widely used Ruby geography tooling (carmen) and implemented civic-data scrapers for City Bureau, showing attention to data quality and internationalization. He’s comfortable spanning full-stack responsibilities—from form helpers and view integrations to robust backend scrapers—and often surfaces practical refinements like sorting, i18n integration, and event-identification that reduce downstream friction.
18 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Interactive Multimedia, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Interactive Multimedia at Columbia College Chicago
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (21)
ruby-rails10
python10
git-repository10
rails10
webscraping10
ruby10
scrapy10
data-extraction10
actionview10
github-repos10
ruby-on-rails10
rspec9
country-codes9
co9
unit-test9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
carmen-ruby/carmen
Mar 2009 - Oct 2017
A repository of geographic regions for Ruby
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:308 commits, 17 PRs, 17 pushes in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the development of the `carmen` library, a geographic regions repository for Ruby. They added new features, including the addition of new regions like Canada. Significant effort was devoted to implementing methods for state and country name and code retrieval, along with the introduction of view helpers for use in Rails applications. The commits also included the addition of country code and name retrieval functionalities.
rubygeographic-dataiso3166
carmen-ruby/carmen-rails
Mar 2012 - Dec 2014
NOT ACTIVELY MAINTAINED Rails adapter for Carmen (provides country_select and subregion_select)
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 3 comments, 2 issues in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Jim contributed to the development of a Rails adapter for Carmen, focusing on form helper methods. Their work involved adding and modifying select tag helpers for countries and subregions. They updated the version and dependencies, and integrated the Rails I18n backend. The user also refactored the code, cleaned up specifications, and improved the sorting of select options.
rails
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