Ben Calabrese Resume

Profile

About

He/Him/His

(619) 208-8943

bencalabrese@gmail.com

Github

Hi, I'm Ben: a seasoned software engineer with experience leading massive scale web applications that power both enterprise and commercial products.

For the past two years I've led the YouTube Kids Living Room team — delivering a kids tailored experience on smart TVs to millions of families. Prior to that, I spent time at Google building and leading frontend projects in Greentea, the CRM that underlies Google's sales team.

In addition to tackling the most technically challenging problems on my projects, I'm a reliable leader: mentoring teammates, guiding architecture, and reviewing code.

Since joining Google, I've:

Designed and built architecture used by web applications across YouTube
Owned the configuration language that powers every chart and table in Google Ads and Greentea
Established myself as a leader in code health across Google, writing best practices on testing and reviewing readability of code for > 200 engineers

Projects I lead are: consumer quality, on-time, comprehensively tested, and ready for new features.

I'm always gearing up for my next challenge.

Skills

TypeScript

JavaScript
Dart

React
Sass

CI/CD
Testing

HTML
AngularDart

CSS
Ruby

Rails
Git

SQL
Python

AWS

Education

App Academy

May 2016

1000 hour-coding school with <5% acceptance rate

Coursework includes: Rails, TDD, OOP, single-page apps, coding style, scalability, algorithms, best practices

S.F. State University

B.A. Drama, May 2013 Summa Cum Laude

Experience

YouTube

Senior Software Engineer July 2019–Present

Tech lead of the YouTube Kids smart TV app, setting its technical direction, collaborating with PM/UX, and mentoring more junior engineers
Expanded reach by millions of DAUs, including launches on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Virgin Media
Drove cross-YouTube projects such as supporting Lottie animations on living room devices
Thrived and innovated while working with complex constraints such as limited user input mechanisms and low memory/compute devices
Shepherded Google wide code health as author of best practices on screenshot testing and as one of ~40 engineers selected for the Dart readability team

Google

Software Engineer Sept. 2016–July 2019

Led frontend development on multiple projects from initial design through to launch
Designed key aspects of Connect Sales, Google's custom CRM, including integration with the support ticket system
Co-owner of custom configuration language used to power all tables, forms, and charts in Google Ads and Connect Sales

Projects

Resume

Live | GitHub

You're reading it!

Animations for the web while still styled for print
For fun, it's mostly hand rolled rather than using a framework. Just TS, Sass, and some Handlebars templating.
Some pretty interesting CSS animations. I used transforms with hidden overflow borders to give the appearance of expanding since reflow properties like height don't animate smoothly.

Constellations

Live | GitHub

Conway's Game of Life simulator

Pure JavaScript game written at App Academy
HTML5 canvas rendering with controls for pan, zoom, and cycle speed
Pans infinitely (Theoretically at least. It'll overflow eventually but it would take a while.)
Added my own wrinkle of letting users add new dots to the board mid-animation

PickupTix

Live | GitHub

Rails/React event ticketing app

Full stack, end of course project for App Academy
Might take a second to spin up (it's on the Heroku free plan)
Dynamic show filter using ActiveRecord to combine arbitrary filter options into a single query
Interactive seat picker for more engaging point-and-click UI