Ben McAdams

Projects

Field Notes capture the journey — this is the destination. The agent tooling, developer experience work, and product bets I've actually shipped, plus the open source I've been lucky enough to contribute to along the way.

Where a project grew out of something I wrote up, I've linked the notes too.

Agents

Personal MCP server exposing my resume, notes, and portfolio as callable tools. Dogfoods the same agent-discovery patterns I ship at work — MCP, JSON Resume, llms.txt, and Schema.org Person JSON-LD.

MCPPersonal SiteJSON Resumellms.txt

Related: MCP is a toolbox. A2A is a coworker., Markdown mirrors, Two kinds of AI crawler

Conceived and built the Zapier Marketplace — a central distribution channel connecting Zapier's connectors, skills, and plugins to agent platforms like Claude, Codex, and GitHub Copilot in a single install.

Zapier MarketplaceAgent PluginsOpen Source
Early adopter of WebMCP

2026

One of the first teams evaluating WebMCP — the emerging proposal for exposing MCP-style tool discovery directly to browser-based agents — for Zapier's web surfaces.

WebMCPMCPAgent Discovery
Endurix

2024

A personal training AI agent for endurance athletes. No longer online, but building it was a great excuse to learn and explore how to build AI applications.

AI AgentsEndurance SportsPersonal Project

Developer Experience

Kubernetes + ArgoCD at Classy/GoFundMe

2023–2024

Stood up Classy's first production Kubernetes clusters on AWS and deployed internal services via ArgoCD (GitOps). Established the container-first default for new services post-acquisition.

KubernetesArgoCDGitOpsAWS
Backstage IDP at GoFundMe

2023–2024

Rolled out Backstage as the internal developer portal — wiring service catalog, tech docs, and health signals into daily engineering workflow.

BackstageDeveloper PortalIDP
Twitter Mobile CI at scale

2019–2022

Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines used daily by 400+ iOS and Android engineers. Cut iOS build times from ~60 minutes to ~15 minutes and led the migration of macOS developer productivity infra from on-premise to the cloud.

CI/CDMobilemacOSCloud Migration

Contributor to the factory that auto-generates SDK examples and CLI command references for every Zapier-supported app and publishes them to zapier/sdk for agent discoverability.

Zapier SDKDeveloper ExperienceAgent Discovery

Product

Managed JSON-LD schema across Zapier's marketing pages

2026

Replaced hardcoded SoftwareApplication JSON-LD with structured Service + OfferCatalog data covering triggers, actions, and integrations. Schema-rich pages won head-to-head in A/B testing against the prior markup.

JSON-LDSchema.orgAgent ReadinessSEO
.md mirrors on Zapier's highest-traffic pages

2026

Shipped Markdown mirrors of every 1S and 2S integration page with Tier 3 llms.txt breadcrumb headers, giving AI crawlers clean, parsable content on the site's most valuable SEO surfaces.

Markdown Mirrorsllms.txtAgent ReadinessSEO
Twitter Finance + Hashflags

2022–2023

Lead engineer on two revenue-generating advertisement products at Twitter, delivered end-to-end across iOS, Android, and web.

AdsiOSAndroidWeb

Personal programmatic SEO site for endurance racing — thousands of running, cycling, swimming, and triathlon events across all 50 US states, organized by state, sport, and individual race. A pSEO template applied to a domain I love.

Programmatic SEOEndurance SportsPersonal Project