Hi, I'm Fuzzy.

I'm a software engineer building technology for progressive campaigns and organizations.

Publications

• The computer vision tech that helped 15,000 voters request a ballot online
  The VoteAmerica Blog, December 2020
• Complex Systems and Unpredictable Technology
  Boston College, AI and the Law, August 2020
• Building a Reliable Fax Pipeline with Twilio and AWS to Expand Access to the Ballot Box
  The Twilio Blog, August 2020
• Typing the Untyped: Soundness in Gradual Type Systems
  Strange Loop, September 2019

Work Experience

• VoteAmerica
  Senior Software Engineer
  April 2020–January 2021
  Built an electronic signature system to let voters request a ballot online. Managed the technical infrastructure that sent over 100 million peer-to-peer texts. Built the backend of The Election Night Integrity Project and the frontend of the 866-OUR-VOTE map. Served as technical lead for txballot.org and the VoteAmerica Voter Helpline.
• Warren for President
  Software Engineer, Organizing Tech
  December 2019–March 2020
  With a team of five engineers and product managers, developed the Warren fork of Spoke, an open-source peer-to-peer texting system. Built integration pipelines between dozens of campaign systems. Created volunteer and organizer tools for caucus night data collection and an election-day hotline system.
• Tulip
  First Employee, Architecture Lead
  Full-time September 2014–December 2019; advisor December 2019–Present
  As first employee, built a web-based system for creating instrumented, connected apps for the manufacturing shop floor. As the team grew from 3 to 70+ and raised over $50M in venture capital, worked on recruiting, mentorship, team organization, roadmap planning, and coordination with business development and customer operations teams. Continue to serve as an advisor on architecture, long-term technical planning, partnerships and integrations, and organizational design and team-building.
• MIT Media Lab
  Undergraduate Researcher
  June 2009–August 2014
  Worked on a wide variety of research projects: Lens, a web-based framework for building projector-camera augmented reality apps; a python framework for building skeleton-tracking applications on the BiDi Screen; and Cartagen, an early example of rendering maps using SVG client-side rather than pre-rendered image tiles.
• Twitter
  Software Engineering Intern
  May 2012–December 2012
  Architected and implemented Clockwork Raven, an open-source, web-based tool for human-powered data analysis using Mechanical Turk. Used by multiple teams at Twitter to gather tens of thousands of judgments weekly.

Hire Me

I am sometimes available for part-time contract work. I've worked with startups, nonprofits, and other organizations on system architecture, frontend and backend development, and building and scaling tech teams. Email hireme@fuzzy.codes.

Please do not contact me about full-time employment if you're not a progressive candidate, nonprofit, or political tech vendor.

Contact

My actual name is Ben Weissmann, but most folks call me Fuzzy. My pronouns are he/him.

hi@fuzzy.codes

github.com/benweissmann