Ben Swierzy

I am a computer science researcher focused on software ecosystem studies. This primarily includes quantative technical studies on package registries and software repositories to investigate how developers engineer and deploy their software. The results provide important and sometimes suprising insights that build a baseline for further research. For example, did you know that packages in JavaScript bundles are updated more timely compared to CDN resources despite more complicated build pipelines? To a large extent, my interests aligns with many topics in the area of software supply chain (security) research and can generally be considered as the boundary of software engineering and system security research. Occasionally, I find quite some fun in administrating Linux servers and developing useful software as well. It's always more fun to work together, so feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to collaborate.

Here is a list of some topics I've worked on in the past:

• Finding packages and versions inside JavaScript bundles
• Finding more than 70,000 spam packages on npm
• Fingerprinting TLS libraries
• Automated Testing of TLS implementations
• Wi-Fi localization and tracking

In addition to the research, I'm quite interested into university-level teaching and the theoretical didactic concepts. In the past years, I've tested multiple options how to optimize the structure of lectures and student supervision within my scope. I often try to combine this process with efficiency aspects, so either increasing teaching quality and outcomes without an increase of (regular) time investment or reducing the time investment without a decrease in quality. Though, I probably must admit that preparing new formats (for now) definitely costs more time than it saves over the time of the course. But at least the everyday work feels more efficient.

Feel free to contact me through any of my socials, although email is probably the most reliable.