About

Ben Johnson is the founder of Bixelcog LLC, an iOS development company in Lancaster, PA, and a senior iOS developer at The Hershey Company.

Ben Johnson grew up in Lancaster, PA. He graduated from Hempfield High School in June 2007. At Hempfield he earned four varsity letters in tennis, played oboe in the concert band, and was co-editor-in-chief of the newspaper. He completed his undergraduate studies at Elizabethtown College in three years, graduating with a BS in mathematics with a second major in economics and a minor in Spanish. After passing actuarial exam FM (financial mathematics), Ben interned with the actuarial department of Arch Insurance in New York, NY during the summer of 2009.

Upon graduation from Elizabethtown College, Ben began graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated with an MS in economics in December 2011. At UNC, he studied applied microeconomics and wrote a Master’s paper titled “Student Debt: Who Borrows?”. He took courses in health economics, labor economics, empirical industrial organization, and econometrics.

He released his first iPhone app, Baseliner, in August 2012. Baseliner keeps a record of the user’s tennis matches. Users can add an opponent, score, date, and notes to each match. Baseliner tracks wins and losses against each particular opponent. The app supports adding matches and opponents through the Shortcuts app. He released Baseliner 2, a complete re-write of the app using SwiftUI, in March 2020, and a Mac version in January 2022.

Ben worked at The Hershey Company from October 2012 to March 2015 and again from December 2015 to January 2020. He worked on a set of iOS apps used by Hershey’s field sales organization. He joined The Hershey Company as a full-time employee in April 2020, to lead iOS development of enterprise apps for the retail team.

He founded Bixelcog LLC, an iOS development company, in August 2014. Through Bixelcog LLC, Ben was the lead iOS developer on the Steinway Spirio iPad app which was featured in Wired.

Ben was a student in Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Computer Science program from 2015 to 2017, graduating with an MS in Computer Science with a concentration in Interactive Intelligence.