Saman Bemel-benrud
Lead Games Engineer at Self-employed
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSaman Bemel-benrud is a Lead Games Engineer in Oakland with 14 years of experience blending game design, front-end engineering, and product leadership. He leads engineering at Puzzmo after a long tenure at Mapbox where he helped grow design and engineering teams and contributed to widely used open-source mapping projects like mapbox-gl-js and Mapbox Studio. A hands-on developer and interaction designer, he shipped a hand-drawn puzzle adventure on Steam and has prototyped playful experiences for Google Doodles. His open-source work spans UI polish, sprite tooling, test automation, and map styling—showing fluency from CSS and SVG scripting to image-processing pipelines. Saman is known for refusing to compromise on user experience while mentoring teams to deliver polished, production-ready tools. His background in fine and studio arts gives his technical work a distinct visual and interaction-focused sensibility.
14 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Fine and Studio Arts, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Fine and Studio Arts at St. Olaf College
Stackoverflow
36reputation
399reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (40)
openstreetmap10
gzip10
javascript10
c-language10
mapbox-gl-js10
leaflet10
mapbox-gl10
testing10
css10
responsive-design10
bash10
ui-design10
drawing10
file-icons10
ruby10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
mapbox/mapbox-gl-styles
Mar 2015 - May 2016
Prebuilt Mapbox GL styles for use in Mapbox GL JS or the Mapbox Mobile SDKs and as a starting point for custom maps built with Mapbox Studio
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 91 commits, 23 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Saman primarily contributed to sprite generation and style updates for the Mapbox GL styles repository. They wrote scripts to generate and manipulate sprite assets, including the use of Inkscape and ImageMagick for image processing. The user also updated existing styles by modifying the scripts and the style definitions themselves, reflecting their work across different aspects of the project.
leafletstarting-pointmapboxmapbox-glsdks
mapbox/maki
Jan 2012 - Sep 2021
A POI Icon Set
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 297 commits, 31 PRs in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Saman primarily contributed to the Maki icon set by modifying and updating the front-end code related to the website's presentation. Their work included reintroducing backgrounds, adding graphics, replacing the Maki logo, and adjusting spacing. They also made minor copy adjustments and fixed placement issues. Further contributions involved adding new icons and fixing paths to ensure proper image display within the website.
svgiconmakiicon-setpoi
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