Benjamin Baron Email & Phone Number

Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia

New York, Ny, Us

iSub was the first app I ever worked on, and most of the development was done from 2010 to 2013 on iOS 3 to 5 when I had to step away from the project due to my position at Apple. I did some update work to support iOS 7 and a few minor changes to support later iOS versions, but otherwise hadn't touched it since then.Just as my time at Dealyze was ending, iOS 14 was released and finally completely broke the app, so I decided to take a few months to work on it again and dive back into the iOS ecosystem as it's my favorite platform to develop. I approached the project as a senior engineer cleaning up and modernizing code written years ago by a junior — who happened to be me. Within a few weeks I was able to fix all of the core issues preventing its use on iOS 14, modernize the UI, and remove all deprecated APIs (some going all the way back to iOS 3).In addition, I've been working on a major re-engineering of the data model, porting the entire app from outdated Objective-C to modern Swift 5, and beginning to add new user facing features allowed by the new data model.As the app has been open source since I officially stopped working on it years ago, all of my work on it can be reviewed here: https://github.com/einsteinx2/iSubMusicStreamer

San Francisco, California, Us

I served as an advisor since Dealyze was conceived almost 10 years ago, and was one of its early angel investors when they graduated the Y Combinator accelerator program. After leaving Balance, I came on board as the VP of Engineering in 2018 to build out the development team and revamp the development processes. I built our remote team in Colombia, managing all local business and legal needs including direct ownership of a Colombia-based S.A.S corporation to hire local employees.I directed, as well as contributed to, all software development, while I grew and led a team of two software engineers and two QA engineers. I was the lead developer of the custom Android kiosk app written in Java 8 and the Windows desktop app written using Electron, JavaScript ES6, React, Redux, and collaborated with the CTO in the development of the backend software written in Golang and utilizing MySQL and Linux.In addition to those responsibilities, I was the sole creator and maintainer of the Dealyze custom Android ROM, while also making direct contributions to custom hardware development with our Shenzhen-based manufacturing partner. I was also the sole system administrator, managing a complex Virtual Machine infrastructure on the Digital Ocean platform. Unfortunately, due to complications related to the COVID pandemic, Dealyze was forced to stop operations in November of 2020.

Williamsburg, New York, Us

Balance started as a side project with two friends, one working as product lead and designer and the other as lead designer. I performed all software engineering on the Balance app from concept to release, after which we were quickly featured by Apple in the Mac App Store.We then decided to pivot to the crypto-currency market and raised a record-breaking 1.3 million dollars on the WeFunder crowdfunding platform in lieu of an ICO. I scaled our dev team up to 4 engineers and oversaw development of our new product direction before leaving to join Dealyze.

Cupertino, California, Us

After only 4 years of self-taught software engineering experience, Apple reached out to me to work on the Photos for Mac team, building the app which ultimately replaced the aging iPhoto. I was extremely lucky to be given the opportunity to work on a 1.0 Apple product, and stayed on the team to continue development of the subsequent major Photos app release, reaching over 20 million users.As part of the "grid" team, I worked on the core user interface of the application, the photo grid, implementing various user interface features used throughout the app, including photo cell interactions, interactive section headers, collection view layouts, the internal custom collection view implementation, and animated GIF support, as well as a myriad of bug fixes to ensure we could release on schedule with OS X Yosemite and El Capitan.My position at Apple was the first time I worked on Mac software, as I had built apps entirely on iOS in the years prior. I was able to utilize my skills in Objective-C, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, and strong Apple developer platform and Xcode developer tools knowledge to successfully transition from iOS to Mac development on the job. In recognition of my work, I received the highest rating, "Exceeded Expectations", for both the "Teamwork" and "Results" categories in both of my annual performance reviews.

Abu Dhabi , Ae

While working on my iSub app, the co-founder of Anghami reached out to me to build the demo of their music streaming app to present to investors. Based on my work, they received their initial funding and I came on board as their lead mobile developer while continuing to work on iSub.I worked with our in-house designers to single-handedly engineer the Anghami iOS app from concept to over 1.3 million downloads with close to a half million monthly active users, while also assisting the Android team to fix release blocking out-of-memory crashes and optimize and prepare the Android app for release. Additionally, I developed a custom chunked audio encryption system utilizing AES that was used in both the iOS and Android apps.

With no formal computer science education and only minor PHP scripting experience as a database administrator, I created what would become a highly rated, advanced music-streaming client for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.I created the concept to fill a personal need, and within a few months released the app into the fledgling iOS App Store. I performed all programming work and feature development, website design, and marketing, as well as provided direct support via email and TeamViewer to end users.The app was originally developed on iOS 3 before the iPad was released, using manually memory managed Objective-C and Apple's early iOS SDK and development tools. Over time, I developed a complex, custom audio engine with multiple format support, gapless playback, full parametric equalizer, and visualizer, and eventually migrated the code to support ARC and other modern (at the time) Objective-C and iOS SDK features, including full support for the then-new iPad platform.To this day, the app remains highly rated and maintains several thousand active weekly users.

Sunrise, Fl, Us

I started as an intern in the IT department; within six weeks was promoted to a senior position on the team. After one year, I transitioned to a junior database administrator role to take advantage of the opportunity to learn a new set of skills. The following year, I took on the senior role as the sole maintainer of over 20 mission-critical MySQL servers in a complex replication scheme with tables larger than 200 million records.