About

I’m Ben - a systems programmer based in Sydney, Australia. I work close to the metal: C and C++, graphics APIs like Vulkan, and security research.

My favourite part of programming is auditing code, where you can enter an adversarial mindset: asking, “the author assumed X here, but is it actually true?” - until something gives. This habit so far has landed me a 9.3-severity server-to-client RCE (reported, since patched) in a multiplayer videogame. In my final year of university I worked on coverage guided grey box fuzzers, de-duplicating seed mutation collisions via bloom filtering to speed up fuzz targets such as Google Snappy under AFL++ as much as 30%.

Lately I’ve been building a videogame-agnostic Vulkan layer that dumps and transparently swaps in AI upscaled textures at runtime - SPIR-V instrumentation to handle texture prioritisation, real time BC7 encoding via bc7f, and a TypeScript/React UI under CEF.

Outside of that

I love linux - I’ve run Linux since I was eleven: booting with Ubuntu on a USB was my only option after I accidentally brought a magnet too close to the laptop’s hard drive. I used to be alarmingly good at FPS games, but I’m retired now and these days I prefer training at an actual gym to an aim trainer.

Most of what I’ve figured out gets typed in comment threads or messages that quickly disappear. This site is for things I want to hold on to - mini projects I care about, techniques or code snippets that exist nowhere else, and opinions I’m attached to.

Getting in touch

The fastest way to reach me is email, and I do reply.

• Email — mail@benjames.dev
• Timezone — AEST (UTC+10)
• Location — Sydney, Australia