Ben tends to think of time as a limited commodity and has his own style of living life to the fullest. He’s going to ask you hard questions and he has the same kind of high expectations for everyone that he has for his staff and his two kids. He tries to be candid but kind, but sometimes he just cuts right to the hard truth. He overthinks everything and, ever the master of the analogy, models everything in life as a metaphor, usually for something in software. Ben is a visionary and spends much of his time painting a picture of the future for clients and staff.
He uses his limited free time to help others with home-improvement tasks, likes to help people move house, and has an unconquerable addiction to coffee – though he is 100% decaf since the summer of 2017 … with periodic lapses. He also rides snowboard in the winter, and bikes casually in the summer – though he maintains that he is the typical nerd preferring the dark and inside spaces to outdoor sports.
Ben wrote PHP for 10 years, but his love affair with JavaScript goes back to 1998 when he was first writing it for Windows Scripting Host building desktop automation and data management. He switched hard to Ruby on the backend in 2013 and really kicked off the current iteration of his professional journey to being more focused on agency work rather than freelance. He’s also a competent Python developer, can write C++, and CSS. Primarily his day-to-day role is less technical, but he’s still the organizational authority on architecture, patterns, refactoring, testing, tools, and data design.
Current role