PagerDuty Community Spotlight: Meet Ben Hutchison, the creator of LaundryDuty

Ben Hutchison, a seasoned Staff Engineer with extensive experience at companies like Cisco and Verizon, is known for his passion for integrating devices into cohesive systems. He gained attention for his open-source project "LaundryDuty," which uses PagerDuty's Event API to send automatic push notifications for laundry reminders, a concept born from his college days of creating a mock smart laundry monitoring system. Hutchison's career is marked by inventive setups, such as a multi-monitor desktop and a Jenkins build alert system with a spinning red light. His experience using PagerDuty spans nine years, during which he developed a custom solution involving smart outlets and Raspberry Pi to notify himself and his roommates when laundry cycles were complete. His innovative approach highlights his expertise in utilizing technology creatively, from controlling game simulators with MIDI interfaces to deploying builds with a physical button.