Benjamin Owens Email & Phone Number

Nijmegen, Ge, Nl

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Netherlands

Owner & operator of Witte Rat Ontwikkeling, providing custom software development, systems administration, and consultation.

I was responsible for developing NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Gallery Pro. NextGEN Gallery is a fully featured image gallery management and display plugin for WordPress, and NextGEN Pro adds ecommerce features targeted for photographers with WHCC integration allowing photographers to sell their images and have them automatically printed, framed, and shipped to customers with no intervention.I was also responsible for the maintenance of Imagely's WordPress themes.

San Luis Obispo, California Area

I was responsible for the maintenance and administration of a small web hosting platform delivering web and email services for 50+ local businesses across the central coast region of California.

Greater New York City Area

I worked on a variety of projects for Croscon ranging from creating a topic-specific social media forum to building an executive insurance policy enrollment system and the development of a Twitter/Youtube API integrator that created WordPress blog posts from social media postings.

I have worked on a contract basis with numerous individuals, small organizations, and local businesses requiring programming, systems administration, and consulting. I have worked with multiple frameworks and languages as best suited for my clients’ needs to create new internal systems and websites, repair or upgrade existing code, and migrate legacy systems to modern ones.

San Luis Obispo, California Area

I oversaw development of TechXpress’ sophisticated custom PHP framework, content management system, ecommerce platform, and newsletter system. I also solely administered its web hosting cluster and customized qmail-based email system.The TechXpress CMS and ecommerce system had many features I developed or were developed under my supervision, including:- Multiple credit card processors, recurring charges, newsletter integrations, a variants and options system for products, coupons, event and appointment booking, recommendations, and receipt printer support.- City level tax calculation across the United States with international sales tax and VAT- Multiple third party integrations including NetSuite, OpenAds/OpenX, PriceGrabber, ShopZilla, Google Base, Bing, VPopMail, MailChimp, Interspire, AWStats, and WordPress.Accurate and automatic international shipping estimation calculation for USPS, UPS, and FedEx. This used a bin packing algorithm to combine multiple cart items into as few packages as possible with optional consideration for fragile packaging.- Inventory management with NetSuite integration- A comprehensive stats reporting system providing detailed reports with AWStats database integration analyzing individual customers traffic leading up to sales.While at TechXpress I was responsible for the overhaul of their legacy PHP 4 based system to a modern and object oriented PHP 5 managed under Mercurial. With a project manager, I co-supervised the work of two locally contracted developers and up to eight members of teams from Russia and India. While I worked there TechXpress built and hosted thousands of sites that combined processed several million dollars a year. Some notable clients at that time included Netgear, Guayaki, Sport Kilt, and 977Music.

San Luis Obispo, California Area

I was contracted to develop esquish.com (now defunct) which took users’ submitted urls and generated thumbnails of the site to be used as visual bookmarks (this is now a feature built directly into almost all browsers). Users could submit their bookmarks directly through the site or through a browser extension which synced browser bookmarks with the site. It was built on Symfony with PostgreSQL and thumbnails were generated using a custom headless browser communicating through gearman to distribute requests across a clustered system.