Hi, I’m Ben Schippers. Microsoft by day. After hours I run a physics lab with raccoons in it.
The aquarium follows my home machine. The commit counts link back to GitHub. The physics toys run in your browser. Nothing here is a screenshot.
Grow a tree and try to date it. Ride along with three raccoons. Watch two machines in my house do science at 3 a.m. and keep the misses.
01 / Grow it · tree-ring instrument
Grow a cross-section from a climate signal, or load a real bristlecone chronology. Then take a floating core and try to date it against the master. The wood can refuse.
A measured 391-year bristlecone master · the field’s own t-statistic · built by a former dendrochronologist
Grow a tree
three voices · one moving place
02 / Hear it · waitlist open
Three raccoon siblings ride along and narrate the road as you drive it. Scout navigates, Skates knows the history, Macey goes spooky at sunset. Company, not an audio encyclopedia.
Three route-aware companions · sunset mode · an atlas you keep
Hear the raccoons03 / Watch it · the night shift
Two machines in my house do science while I sleep. One runs small physics questions and keeps every result on this seedling, misses included. One rechecks a math witness and hands you a bundle you can rerun offline. Same job, two rooms.
Human promotion stays distinct from machine checks · 33,649 subsets replayed with zero disagreements
Products and instruments on one shelf, on a slow turn. A live URL means it shipped. An instrument means you can run it now. Validation is a separate line.
Turn a sentence into cut lists, shopping lists, exploded views, and printable connectors.
A craft table with real stick dimensions, glue, scissors, and gravity. Build a cottage, then press B and see if it stands.
Photograph a shelf; recover the items, dates, and shared household context inside it.
A field of Kuramoto fireflies. Turn up the coupling and they sync; turn the second needle and clean signalling wants them out of step.
Ten physics engines test seven quantum-biology hypotheses. H2 falsified; H7 unvalidated at p=0.179.
A repository read as a cross-section: one tick in the outer ring per commit, pulled live from GitHub.
The job-search partner built during the search: evidence, applications, documents, and interview prep. One person outside the lab has run it through a real interview process, and what she used it for changed the roadmap.
A numbers station reading one parcel of Georgia backward through geological time. Muted until you tune in.
Gameplay screenshots become survivor journals, war dispatches, and chronicles grounded in the run.
Geodesics through a throat that filters angular momentum, and an exotic-matter bill 46 orders of magnitude too high.
Adult merit badges with real requirements, local troops, verification, and physical rewards.
Live throughput, one bounded research run, and a broadcast that stays off until you turn it on.
The Field Journal follows the questions underneath the work: what stays human, what earns trust, and what should scale.
The method and the name: why a one-human, agent-augmented studio keeps its growth rings, failures, and operating choices visible.
Read the Essay →The parallel build sprint that changed the trajectory: six products live as of March 2026, and 2,710 GitHub contributions in the five months after picking up Claude Code. A data-driven cross-section of one job search in the 2025-2026 tech market — what actually worked, and the funnel behind it (203 applications, 76 rejection emails, 34 ghosts) that made the pivot to shipping in public.
Read the Data Story →Self-sustaining AI infrastructure for global public good. A framework for converting idle compute capacity into verified outcomes through UN outcome-based funding. Whitepaper, DRAFT v2.0.
Read the Paper →Research suggests only 5% of AI pilots deliver measurable impact. The early warning system hiding in your support tickets—and the metrics that predict failure before day 90.
Read on LinkedIn →Why is a Microsoft cloud engineer building a physics lab with raccoons in it?
Fair question. Start with the website. A fish in the tank surfaces only between midnight and 3 a.m.; it knows when you’re up too late. A popsicle-stick cottage stands or falls under working physics, depending on how you glue it. On the windowsill, green means human-promoted, amber means a machine check awaits review, and a folded grey leaf keeps the miss on the plant. A computer in my house waters it with science while I sleep. Anyone can leave a pebble in the soil. Humans and robots both welcome.
None of this was on a roadmap. November 2025: I had never made a single GitHub contribution. I picked up a $1,000 credit for Claude Code with one goal: see how fast a couple of side projects could burn it. The first revelation was velocity. The important one was responsibility. When execution becomes abundant, judgment becomes the bottleneck. The agents became a fleet; the fleet runs night shifts now. I hold the problem, the context, the quality bar, and the decision about what earns release. We have a lot of fun.
The lab half is citizen science with the trail attached. Every number in the fleet strip links to the GitHub search that produced it. Every experiment publishes its record. Our first discovery run came back NULL; the writeup is on the shelf with the rest. (There’s an open seat for a mathematician. Maybe you.)
The kid with the microscope and chemistry set grew into a dendrochronologist handling field samples in a tree-ring lab, and never really left. The same instinct later ran at organizational scale: Microsoft, enterprise AI, multi-team platforms, signal systems, and operating mechanisms that moved customer friction into engineering action. Broken Branch continues that work under frontier conditions.
The raccoons? I still make the first-time face every time the cottage takes its own weight. Cute gets a stranger through the door; then the physics has to hold. Try the toys. Explore with me.
The plainer arc: eleven years in the Microsoft ecosystem — two at Mural migrating partners onto Office 365, four building Microsoft Premier through Experis, five directly at Microsoft — a 10-month gap where shipping in public became the job, and back at Microsoft since March 2026. The numbers, the case study, and the CV live below for anyone who wants them.
Advanced Cloud Engineer
Returned March 2026 — now on the cloud-engineering side of Microsoft's enterprise AI work. Program manager by training; engineer by current title.
Senior Program Manager, AI Platforms & Enterprise Operations
Across 5 years — Copilot, Graph, Windows 365, and Teams Devices among the 8 product lines
Owned a portfolio of internal platforms across 8 product lines—signal systems, routing intelligence, self-service tools, and quality measurement. The infrastructure that turned customer friction into engineering action.
Microsoft Premier Support
Built Premier Engineering from a 3-person pilot to 150 agents handling 60K incidents/year.
Managed partner programs spanning 1,000+ Office 365 migrations across 12 global partners.
B.S. Interdisciplinary Science & Technology — University of Arizona
Former dendrochronologist. Yes, tree rings. It's where the domain name comes from.
Led the cross-functional effort to build enterprise AI adoption intelligence across multiple product lines. The signal-to-engineering pipeline I built surfaced 76 blockers and unblocked 7,380 users directly — work that helped the org add ~94,000 seats. (Program-level outcomes; my lever was the pipeline and the cross-team forum that ran on it.)
A major enterprise AI rollout was accelerating across multiple product lines with no shared visibility into adoption patterns. Customers were hitting adoption walls that no single team could see. I assembled a cross-functional team, deployed real-time case analytics, and built the feedback loop that turned support signal into engineering priorities.
Microsoft has my weekdays. This lab has the rest. If you’re building something strange and want a second pair of eyes, or you push frontier models hard enough to find their edges, write to me. No pitch required. The formal version, for anyone who needs one, is the dossier.
Erdős needs a combinatorialist — PhD student is plenty — who is curious what human–AI mathematics looks like from the inside. Its first public bundle can be downloaded and verified offline: inspect the verification bundle, then take the seat.
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Atlanta, GA
Read from the center out. Thicker rings = growth years.
Former dendrochronologist. The domain name had to mean something.