John Bentley

Research to Production Systems

I build mathematical and computational infrastructure that takes research to production. I'm currently finishing an MSc in Mathematical and Computational Finance at Oxford. Previously, I led quant research and research engineering at Betterment. I contributed to every step of the pipeline from model development through production deployment and evaluation. I studied math and philosophy at Yale.

This site features some of my fun coding projects and a couple non-technical endeavors. You can also read some essays and project write-ups here.

Selected Coding Projects

AvaLong — A web app for playing The Resistance: Avalon asynchronously. Take turns at your own pace over days, or play in real-time. Handles all the game logic: proposals, voting, missions, and the assassination phase. I currently have it running on an OpenBSD webserver from openbsd.amsterdam.

Showdown Warrior — A machine learning framework for training Pokémon Showdown battle AI. Modular architecture lets you swap decision-making strategies. Bots can learn from self-play or by watching human matches.

LumaBeat — An Arduino project that makes LED strips respond to music in real-time. Uses FFT to analyze audio frequencies and map them to colors—bass maps to reddish, treble blue.

Fixing a Typo on FreeBSD Setup Screens — I ran into this while setting up my Raspberry Pi to run FreeBSD and it led to my first FOSS OS contribution :)

Some Other Stuff

My brother Tim is a musician. I maintain his site. We recently made an EP together with our sister called Horse Lizard Bird.

My review of Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Müller, and Stuart A. Umpleby's New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics was published in the American Book Review.