Building the infrastructure that keeps the internet moving — at Meta by day, founder by nature. I care about systems that are fast, resilient, and actually work.
I'm Benjamin — a 27-year-old infrastructure engineer at Meta based in San Francisco. I spend my days thinking about scale, reliability, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes everything else possible.
Outside of Meta, I run BTJ Ventures, a holding company for the things I'm building. Right now that's awallaby, Sudsy, and XPostIt. I'm drawn to businesses where doing the technical work correctly actually matters.
Working on large-scale systems infrastructure — the kind of work where a single decision touches billions of people. Focused on reliability, efficiency, and keeping things running when they shouldn't fail.
Running BTJ Ventures as a holding company for the businesses I build — awallaby, Sudsy, and XPostIt. Interested in finding more technical businesses where quality of execution is the moat.
In a world of vibe-coded, AI-generated everything, reliability is quietly becoming a lost art — and so is the infrastructure beneath it.
One-click platforms made shipping so frictionless that almost nobody learns what happens below the deploy button anymore. So I do it the hard way: every BTJ Ventures business runs on infrastructure I build and operate myself — no AWS, no managed cloud, no one-click deploys. It's not necessarily better, and at my scale it's definitely not cheaper. But it's a hell of a lot more fun — and it means I answer for every layer of what I ship.
Three companies, one standard of execution.
Engineering-first IT partner obsessed with quality. Helpdesk, infrastructure, cloud, compliance — done right, not just done.
Real-time washer and dryer availability for apartment buildings. A peel-and-stick sensor puts live machine status on every tenant's phone — no more hauling laundry downstairs just to find everything taken.
Write once, publish everywhere. Cross-post your content across every platform from a single place.
Sites and apps I build and help run — where I'm the engineer, not the founder.
A site I designed, built, and keep running for AVM.
A coaching app I built for Andres Villarreal, a successful UGC creator, to run his mentorship program — keeping clients, sessions, and progress organized in one place as he coaches people up to become successful creators themselves.
I care about how technology actually works in people's lives — not just in the abstract, but in practice. These are a few things I'm actively thinking about, building toward, or advocating for.
I recently pulled my data out of every major cloud provider. Email moved off Microsoft 365 to Spaceship Mail (Namecheap's no-nonsense alternative). Photos out of Google and iCloud — now running Immich locally. Files off Google Drive — replaced with a self-hosted Seafile instance. All of it on my own hardware, under my own control.
Submitted a full removal request through CA Drop to scrub my information from data brokers across California. I also asked my family to take action against California's proposed AB 1709 — a bill that would force all social media users to verify their identity regardless of age, trading anonymity for a false sense of safety. The EFF has the full picture: take action here →
A strong supporter of the right-to-repair movement and the legislative work being done through FUTO. Louis Rossmann and others are doing real work to make repair legal, practical, and protected — because planned obsolescence is a choice, not an inevitability.
Apps, hardware, and services I actually use — with honest opinions attached.
Open-source firewall & router. Rock-solid, auditable, and genuinely powerful. Runs my entire home network.
APs and switches for home networking. Enterprise-grade hardware at a price that doesn't require a PO.
My preferred OS for servers. Stable, boring in the best way, and never gets in the way of getting work done.
Virtualization platform for the homelab. Free, KVM-based, and handles everything from VMs to LXC containers.
Self-hosted file sync. My replacement for Google Drive — fast, reliable, stays on my hardware.
Self-hosted photo library. Pulled all my photos out of Google Photos and iCloud. Great Google Photos lookalike.
Reverse proxy and web server of choice. Straightforward config, battle-tested, handles everything I throw at it.
Automated TLS certificate management via ACME. Free, automatic, and makes "no excuse not to use HTTPS" actually true.
SSH client that works everywhere — Mac, iPhone, iPad. Encrypted vault, cross-device sync, clean UI. The one I always come back to.
Still the editor. Fast, extensible, and the ecosystem is unmatched.
CAD/CAM for 3D modeling and design. When I need to make something physical, this is where it starts.
My primary AI assistant. Strong reasoning, great for technical work, and it actually thinks before answering.
Google's model. Strong for multimodal tasks and deep research. A solid second in rotation.
Apple hardware is the hardware. The integration between the two is still unmatched for daily use.
Browser that respects how you work. Tabs stacked, tiling, deep customization — Chromium under the hood without the Google.
Still the gold standard for low-latency voice. Self-hostable, lightweight, and not trying to be a social network.
Password manager. Zero-knowledge architecture, strong 2FA support. Does the job well without drama.
Whether it's about infrastructure, a business idea, or just to say hello — my inbox is open.