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Ben is Livin’ the Dream on a Farmette
Ben Hammen has been a Principal Firmware Engineer at Dojo Five since May of 2021, and is our favorite Wisconsinite on staff, residing in Berlin, WI.
Near the shores of Wisconsin’s massive Lake Winnebago lies Little Chute, WI, home to Jack’s Frozen Pizza - as well as the boyhood home of Ben Hammen. Little Chute once held a record for the world’s largest block of cheese and no one will be surprised to find out that Ben fondly remembers subsisting on a diet of only cheese for 3 months when the record-breaking block of cheese was consequently sold off and consumed by the townsfolk.
Aside from the cheese, Ben got into video games growing up. He had an interest in becoming a game developer, and read the Borland C Compiler book in 6th grade. Before heading off to college at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville, he had developed an interest in embedded, because there was a greater sense of satisfaction in writing code that did things in the physical world. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering with a focus on control theory and digital design.
He spent a year after undergrad working on instrumentation and control systems at a renewable energy provider in Duluth, before spending a decade leading diverse development initiatives at the world’s leading commercial laundry machine manufacturer. While he was rooted in embedded, he tackled many software initiatives. This included developing secure mobile payment systems and mobile apps, and implementing DevOps practices.
That interest in project and discipline diversity led him to Dojo Five, where he’s enjoying the variety of projects, languages, and ecosystems. He typically operates in C, C++, and FreeRTOS. He has been working lately in Zephyr and Yocto, and wants to get more into Rust.
"It’s great working on a team where everyone is truly passionate about what we’re doing."
Ben’s ideal job is working on various cool projects from the comfort of his home, with a team that’s committed to learning and continuous improvement. His personal interests are in how we can make an impact on society through things like neuromorphic computing and synthetic biology.
He’s living his best life when he can spend quality time with his wife and daughter on his farmette. He’s been raising bees, ducks, chickens, and geese, while maintaining vegetable gardens and an orchard. He has a collection of guitars that he no longer plays, recently quit the crossfit gym, and had to sell his foosball table to make payments on his bird feed account. But I’m sure Ben - or his neural-networked cybernetic automaton clone - will come back around to those hobbies someday.
