A long résumé, told slowly.
I'm Ben Phillips — a full-stack software engineer who has spent sixteen years building .NET software, mostly desktop applications and integration systems for a manufacturing environment where things have to keep running through shift changes, network blips, and the occasional thing nobody planned for.
- 41 years old · Southeast USA
- Married 20 years · two teenagers · one Jack Russell
- Christian; tries to live like it
- Works in VB.Net, C#, TypeScript, Python; speaks fluent legacy
Career, year by year.
§ 02 / TIMELINEApplication Developer
Sole primary developer for eight years. Walked into a codebase with no source control, no dev environment, and .NET 3.5 — drove TFS adoption, stood up a real dev environment, and built or rescued most of the company's 25+ application portfolio. Recent focus is solutions architecture, IT/OT integration, and the early AI surface: the company's first in-house LLM assistant and a small set of Model Context Protocol servers for safe LLM access to internal systems. Certified internal QMS Auditor (ISO 9001:2015) since 2018.
Supplier Portal — contract → full-time
Originally hired as a contractor to build the company's external-facing Supplier Portal — an HTML / CSS / JavaScript web app letting domestic and foreign suppliers view their own records, occurrences, and PPM data. Converted to full-time the same year, then pivoted into the internal manufacturing-software portfolio.
Software Developer
Started as a junior developer on middleware applications at one of the world's largest aggregate producers. Moved to QuoteToCash, the Silverlight sales-quoting system used by reps across the country, then was promoted to mid-level and put on the Telematics team — building out telematics integration in MuleSoft alongside the BA, PM, and business owners. We parted ways in 2018 when the company relocated its IT department.
IT Support & Junior .NET Developer
My first professional .NET role — half IT support, half development. I owned the ETL side: SSIS pipelines importing county tax-payment data, and the back-and-forth with county staff across the country on getting their data in clean. The support half taught me early what it costs when the people relying on your software can't do their job without it.
What I'm good at.
§ 03 / SKILLSDesktop applications
WinForms, WPF, Blazor Server, Electron. Single-window apps that have to stay running through a shift change — including one that runs three continuous shifts without a restart.
Services & integrations
C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET Core, message buses, SQL Server, plus the older surface: PLCs, label printers, ERP systems, telematics, and the occasional binary protocol that predates current memory.
AI & LLM engineering
In-house LLM assistant in production, Model Context Protocol servers for safe LLM access to internal systems, knowledge-base ingestion pipelines, system-prompt design, and a reusable chat control that lets legacy WinForms apps embed assistants without being rewritten.
Solutions architecture & integration
Boring interfaces between teams, distributed monitoring, profile-based delivery, multi-tier systems, and the IT/OT bridge into the Factory Automation team's industrial-PLC platform. The recent flagship is a four-tier integration system deployed on ~100 workstations.
Platform & library engineering
The shared libraries the rest of the codebase depends on — centralized logging with a custom Serilog DB sink (consumed by ~90% of internal apps), the environment / config library the whole stack reads from, shared API contract envelopes adopted cross-team, and the PLC communication wrapper.
Quality & process
Certified internal QMS Auditor (ISO 9001:2015) since 2018. The audit role and the developer role inform each other — and produce tools like the in-development audit-prep dashboard, built by a working auditor for working auditors.
The rest of it.
I've been married twenty years. We have a daughter who's nineteen, a son who's seventeen, and a nine-year-old Jack Russell who runs the house. I'm a Christian — that shows up in how I work as much as anywhere else. We live in a small town in the Southeast and we mean it when we say we like the quiet life.