I am a software engineer, amateur oil painter, and curious reader.

I grew up in France and moved to the United States in 02008. I have dual citizenship since 02023. I currently live in Tallahassee, Florida.

You can contact me by email at me@benfle.com or find me on the web, usually as benfle: bluesky, github, and linkedin.

Projects

Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago

I started the basic program in 02023. For 4 years, a group of 10 to 20 people discuss 3 hours every week about their reading and understanding of some of the great books.

Oil Painting

In 02018, I picked up oil painting thanks to Mark Carder's Draw Mix Paint method. I have been painting ever since.

Cognitect Labs - AWS API

I led the early development of cognitect-labs/aws-api, a data-oriented Clojure library that provides programmatic access to Amazon Web Services.

Access Watch

A JavaScript log processing library that provides a DSL to write custom log processing agents for inputs of any type.

META II

A JavaScript implementation of the META II metacompiler as described by Val Shorre in the original paper from 01964.

SICP

Solutions in Racket and Clojure to exercises in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Reading SICP conscientiously and doing the exercises was a fun and rewarding experience that I recommend.

Beginner guide to Clojure

I co-authored a beginner guide to Clojure for ClojureBridge, an organization aiming to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for underrepresented groups in tech.

Whatever work there is should have as much meaning as possible. Wherever possible, workmen should be artists; their work should be the application of knowledge or science and known and enjoyed by them as such. They should, if possible, know what they are doing, why what they are doing has the results it has, why they are doing it, and what constitutes the goodness of the things produced. They should understand what happens to what they produce, why it happens in that way, and how to improve what happens. They should understand their relations to others cooperating in a given process, the relation of that process to other processes, the pattern of them all as constituting the economy of the nation, and the bearing of the economy on the social, moral, and political life of the nation and the world. Work would be humanized if understanding of all these kinds were in it and around it.

—Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation