I'm Benjamin Reed, aka Ranger Rick, aka Raccoon Fink when I make music.
I've been in open source software development in various capacities for years, most notably:
- the first technical hire at OpenNMS, a Java-based network monitoring platform
- a core maintainer for many years at Fink
- that weirdo that decided to (mostly single-handedly) port KDE3 and, as it was being developed, KDE4 to MacOS X
- more silly side projects than you can shake a stick at
I'm into music, good coffee, baking, TTRPGs, and sometimes blowing up giant robots with other giant robots.
I was born in Wisconsin and lived in Illinois for much of my formative years, but I live in the Raleigh, NC area now, and have for over 20 years. I've been married to my partner for 17 of those. ❤️
I've been writing music for decades, starting with early PC trackers like Multitracker, Scream Tracker, and Impulse Tracker. Nowadays I use Renoise which is the great-great-great grandchild of oldskool trackers, with a modern interface and workflow, and support for VSTs, sidechains, and more.
I fell out of writing stuff for a while, and then I discovered this weird thing called Blaseball. One of the teams is the Seattle Garages, which then spawned an actual band called The Garages. On a whim I joined up while they were working on a lo-fi beats album, and I ended up writing a song about salmon-modeling software (it's a long but fun story as to why).
This awakened my muse and I proceeded to collaborate on a lot of Garages stuff, as well as some side projects like Putrid Shark. Since then I have been regularly releasing solo music again, under the name Raccoon Fink. Most recently, I've been writing a lot of Dungeon Synth, after finding out I was accidentally a tiny part of Dungeon Synth history.
Bandcamp has been indispensable to me, and I hope I can help out this project in some way as both an artist and a programmer.