John Bender is a software verification researcher and engineer with 17 years of experience bridging formal methods, programming languages, and practical software delivery. Currently at Sandia National Laboratories, he focuses on formal verification for cybersecurity, verified compilers, and verifiable computation, building on a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA. He pairs deep research in concurrency and weak memory models with hands-on engineering—from contributing to widely used front-end projects like jQuery-related libraries to improving Vagrant’s infrastructure and test suites. His background includes smart-contract security audits at Quantstamp and senior engineering roles at Adobe, reflecting a rare mix of rigorous formal expertise and production-grade tooling/CI experience. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved testing and UX across projects such as picturefill, grunticon, and responsive-carousel, often tackling subtle edge cases in cross-platform input and asset handling. Based in Los Angeles, he combines academic rigor with pragmatic fixes that make complex systems more reliable and usable.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at University of Hawaii at Manoa
Finds the Above the Fold CSS for your page, and outputs it into a file
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:1 release, 75 commits, 10 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:John's primary contributions involved enhancing the critical CSS generation tool. They implemented functionality to process CSS using PostCSS, specifically integrating a plugin to handle initial CSS values. Additionally, the user addressed bugs related to media queries and nested directives, ensuring more accurate critical CSS extraction. They also worked on a refactoring effort, refactoring code to improve the restoration of original CSS definitions.
A jQuery-based script for responsive carousels that work with mouse, touch, and keyboard
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:2 releases, 116 commits, 4 PRs in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:John primarily worked on enhancing the "responsive-carousel" project, a jQuery-based script. Their contributions focused on improving the carousel's functionality, particularly concerning looping, navigation, and drag interactions. The user implemented features to prevent the carousel from looping and refined the behavior of navigation buttons in non-looping scenarios. They also addressed issues related to touch-based drag interactions.
carouselsjqueryjavascriptmousetouch
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