Ben Gattas

About Me

G'day!

I'm Ben, a full-stack software engineer from the sunny city of Brisbane, Australia.

I completed my studies in software engineering and economics at the University of Queensland in 2021, and since then have been working at a software company called Xero in Melbourne, Australia.

My main interests are in cloud infrastructure (especially AWS) and distributed systems. I like to tinker with everything from frontend tooling to low-level infrastructure though.

Outside of work I'm really passionate about music! I play violin in my local community orchestra and play piano in my free time.

Contact

My Skills

TypeScript

React / Redux / Sagas

Node.JS

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Python

C# / .NET

Java

Projects I'm not super side-projecty but I did some research projects that I've listed here, as well as some web and mobile apps that I've worked on.
I'm currently working on a private photo-sharing app built in NextJS on an AWS backend (Github link - still a work in progress)

Evaluating Feature Attribution Methods

My undergraduate honours thesis was in the area of interpretable deep learning.

I developed a software package to use popular, established methods to "explain" the predictions of black-box neural network models in terms of input features. For example, showing that a model predicting "rabbit" looked at the ears and eyes in making its prediction.

The paper examined the effectiveness of these methods and came up with several ways to evaluate them.

Github Paper

Wellspring Genetics

A responsive static website built for a specialist medical clinic in Brisbane.

This was designed in Adobe XD and built in HTML / CSS following mobile-first, responsive CSS.

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

Adobe XD

Live Link

Securities Lending Cordapp

A proof-of-concept distributed ledger "dApp" that lets users buy/sell securities and carry out security loans, built on an early version of the Corda platform.

I completed this project as part of an internship at a fintech software company in Brisbane called GBST.

Kotlin

Java

SQL

Corda

Github

Operapedia

A cross-platform mobile app that delivers IPA and Italian translations for arias in the standard opera repertoire.

This was built as part of a capstone university team project, and it was a way to give back to the classical music community (although the app never launched publicly!)

Flutter

Dart

Firebase

Adobe XD

Project Bluto

A cross-platform mobile app for distributed, privacy-preserving contact tracing, based on Ethereum smart contracts.

This was built as part of a capstone university project around the time when Covid-19 contact tracing through mobile phone proximity was a hot topic research area.

React Native

Javacsript

Ethereum