Ben Hammond
Denver Developer
&& Song Builder

I'm an endlessly curious web developer, with a parallel career performing and operating a tech-forward music business. I am a graduate of McGill University and General Assembly, living in Denver, Colorado with my family.

I am currently employed by the Morehouse School of Medicine, proudly working on the open-source Health Equity Tracker, which was built by Google.org and the Satcher Health Leadership Institute.

I believe deeply in the power of music and technology to uplift our communities, so please reach out if I can help or answer any questions you may have. Let's build something together!

React / TypeScript / Python / Pandas / D3 / Tailwind / GCP / Docker / Playwright

☆ Resume ☆ Email

Ben Hammond selfie holding guitar with a Denver sunset glowing behind

Currently:
Sr. Software Engineer (Team Lead)

HET — Health Equity Tracker

Health Equity Tracker

View Site GitHub Repo

Free-to-use data visualization platform enabling new insights into the impact of COVID-19 and other social and political determinants of health on historically underrepresented groups in the US; built collaboratively by Google.org and continuously expanded by the Satcher Health Leadership Institute

Role details

Ownership of Health Equity Tracker frontend, coordinating MVP hand-off from Google.org to our small team and continuing development into an award-winning platform.
Personally achieved: 90% reduction in dataset transfer sizes by adding gzip Express middleware, 85% improvement on bundle sizes by code-splitting and lazy-loading React components, and another 84% reduction in data shipped on our slowest reports (100% faster load times) by refactoring Airflow DAGs, setting permissions with Terraform and using SQL to query and export dramatically smaller JSON files.
Personally quadrupled the number of trackable data types, completing research and writing new Python modules that process datasets across disparate sources using Pandas; Docker to containerize and upload for execution on GCP Cloud Run / BigQuery.
Addressed over 170 accessibility audit items, adding screen-reader navigation to our Vega and D3 visualizations and making open-source contributions to NPM packages that improved usability for hundreds of thousands of users
Architected an integrated blog and content management system, utilizing a headless Wordpress dashboard and incorporating content directly using React Query persisted via local storage.
Representing our organization in communications with NPR, CDC, Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; collaboration with outside agencies to allow for problem-free insertion of newly designed components.
Created a design system and standardized styling system, refactoring an inconsistent mix of Sass modules, Material UI, and inline styles into a custom Tailwind theme using a design token library. Included expanded tests with all new functionality; identified the lack of “end to end” testing and implemented coverage using Playwright running on CI and against production, added missing Typescript custom typing to expedite development and prevent errors.

Python

Pandas

Pytest

Docker

Terraform

GitHub Actions

GCP

Airflow

BigQuery

React

TypeScript

Vitest

Playwright

MUI

Tailwind

Vega

Pre-Commit

Biome

Ongoing Side Projects

benhammondmusic.com Professional Musician Site Project

Dev Portfolio — benhammondmusic.tech

benhammondmusic.tech

View Site GitHub Repo

My web dev and software engineering online presence. Built with Astro and React islands for real-time client-side hydration; live GitHub activity, recent blog posts, and library reading history all fetched at runtime via Netlify Functions.

Astro

React

TypeScript

Tailwind

Music Site — benhammondmusic.com

benhammondmusic.com

View Site GitHub Repo

Refactored my professional music site to incorporate modern web best-practices and allow seamless CI/CD with Netlify and GitHub; filterable song search for improved user experience.

SvelteKit

TypeScript

Tailwind

benhammondmusic.com Data Visualization Playground

Data Viz — Music Career Visualization Playground

Music Career Visualization Playground

View Site GitHub Repo

Visualizing the metadata behind my music career: tempo distribution, key signatures, danceability, genre bubbles, and more. Spotify playlist data fetched via API, cached in Upstash Redis, and rendered with D3 and Svelte islands.

Svelte

TypeScript

Redis

Spotify API

Community Site — MyDenverCard Free

MyDenverCard Free

View Site GitHub Repo

Auto-collects current and upcoming free events and activities for MyDenverCard holders and their parents. Scrapes and aggregates listings so families always know what free options are available this week.

Templ

GitHub Actions

Ben Hammond
Denver Developer
&& Song Builder