Ben Burkholder

Designed, developed, and deployed a comprehensive suite of .NET applications for a high-volume PCBA manufacturing facility, integrating AI/LLM capabilities, real-time telemetry, and critical MES/SAP systems. Architected a gRPC-based telemetry backbone and leveraged reverse-engineered EF Core entities to streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency. Delivered significant impact, including reducing defect triage time from minutes to seconds and automating application deployments via Azure DevOps.

• Developed six production AI chat applications using Python, LangChain ReAct, and GPT-4o-mini, enabling natural-language SQL querying and real-time token streaming.
• Built an enterprise WPF LLM desktop client with Active Directory integration, live AI token streaming, and osTicket helpdesk functionality.
• Reduced PCBA defect triage time to seconds by reverse-engineering a FactoryLogix MES schema and building a WPF serial-number tracing tool.
• Architected a production gRPC proxy Windows Service with code-first protobuf-net and Rx.NET for real-time telemetry across factory automation services.
• Developed a .NET MAUI operations dashboard streaming live factory telemetry via gRPC server-streaming and deploying via MSIX/AppInstaller.
• Created a cross-platform .NET MAUI diagnostic utility rendering MES and SAP work order data, backed by a gRPC Worker Service and 300+ EF Core entities.
• Engineered GrpcLib, a shared .NET class library centralizing 500+ EF Core entities from ten SQL Server schemas, serving as the unified data backbone.
• Automated application deployments and accelerated release cycles through Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines.
• Designed and maintained SAP-to-FactoryLogix MES integration services, minimizing downtime and revenue impact through real-time monitoring and authenticated REST APIs.

Developed a comprehensive automated QA infrastructure from inception, leveraging Java, Selenium, and REST Assured within a Serenity BDD framework. This included reverse-engineering production database schemas to create reproducible test environments and deploying tests via a fully integrated CI/CD pipeline. The resulting system enabled rapid regression testing and provided continuous visibility into test coverage.

• Reverse-engineered undocumented production database schemas to create minimal, reproducible test databases for consistent test runs.
• Implemented Serenity BDD with Gherkin/Cucumber, generating JUnit tests and self-updating Living Documentation for comprehensive test suite visibility.
• Containerized test environments with Docker and orchestrated parallel execution on AWS ECS/Fargate to eliminate bottlenecks and ensure environment isolation.
• Integrated the test suite into the Maven + Jenkins + Bamboo CI/CD pipeline, automating regression runs on every code commit.
• Developed custom HTML/JavaScript tooling to address edge-case scenarios, adopted by the entire QA team.

bbApplied Technology, LLC was founded to pursue independent research and development across diverse domains, delivering commercial products and prototypes leveraging .NET and embedded systems. Projects encompassed secure communication, real-time sensor intelligence, IoT solutions, and power electronics, consistently employing full-stack architecture and self-directed development. Solutions spanned from hardware design to multi-platform application development, demonstrating expertise in complex systems integration.

• Developed and launched CryptoMessenger, a self-hosted, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform utilizing BouncyCastle CMS, mutual TLS, and Pi-XOR encryption for zero-server message visibility.
• Architected BbSecureStream, a sessionless PKI authentication system for UDP multicast networks employing CMS-signed responses and a proxy 'vortex' pattern for anonymous upstream communication.
• Engineered the Concept Layer Compute (CLC) framework, a real-time intelligence architecture utilizing a graph journal and gRPC streaming for autonomous sensor concept processing and LLM bridge queries.
• Designed production-ready power electronics hardware, including MPPT solar charge controllers, lithium BMS HATs, and a Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board, generating fabrication-ready Gerber/CAM output.
• Built ZnBrDaqHelper, a UWP DAQ control application for flow battery research, incorporating custom serial protocols, EF Core persistence, and live data visualization.
• Decomposed backend infrastructure into purpose-specific WCF REST microservices, including a PKI CA service and a unified push notification dispatch layer with client certificate authentication.
• Implemented cross-platform solutions leveraging PCL and .NET Standard to share cryptographic models and service abstractions across Xamarin.Forms, UWP, iOS, Android, and Windows.
• Developed BbLoRa, an edge IoT telemetry system pairing LoRa radio with a .NET 6 microservice stack on Raspberry Pi, integrating GPIO sensor ingestion, Docker containerization, and a WinUI 3 client.