Hi, Iʼm Ben.
Iʼm a software engineering leader, ex-founder, ex-Meta.
I like to make things.
2026
2025
2016
2015
2014
- Generate JSON Index of Images with awk and identify
- Type-check Your JavaScript with TypeScript
- “Bubble” Lines up and down Like Sublime Text in Vim
- Vim Auto-closers Compared
2013
- Should You Move Away from Heroku to Protect Your Users?
- Quantified Self
- Serve HTTPS from Elastic Beanstalk Application Instances
- Mock to Mobile in Minutes with Codiqa, Trigger.io and TestFlight
2012
- If You Had an API for Your Email, What Would You Do with It?
- Lean Startup Resources
- Small Data: Processing CSV in Unix
- Personal Finance Dashboards for UK Customers
- Play 2.0 and Scalate Step-By-Step
- Authentication Workflow for Gitlab, Gitolite and AD
- The Specious Notion That Everybody Has to Earn A Living
2010
- Moving to HTML5
- Towards Testing OpenRasta Views (OR 2.0.3, .NET 4, VS 2010)
- Hack Your Life with Remember the Milk
2009
- Mixcloud Is a Great Site for Sharing Mixes
- How I Work
- Clojure: A Stateless Dynamically-typed Lisp on the JVM
- Software Development Advice for Startups
- Django, Drupal, Webmachine: Different Frameworks for Different Projects
- Python Syntax Highlighting with Chili
- Use SSH Public Key Authentication with Fabric
- Working from Bali, Working from London
- Client-side MVC Is Maturing
- Announcing aftnn.org Version 2.0
- 5 Tips for Professional Site Themes on WordPress.com
- Reading "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures"
- Haskell Web Frameworks Reinvent Too Much
- Nginx+Django+FastCGI
- Followize - A Trimmed down, Fast and Efficient Web App for Reading Tweets
- Building a Twitter Client
2008
- Erlang Summary
- BrightKite/GMaps Auto-mashup
- In Search of Silicon Valley, Post-mortem
- In Search of Silicon Valley: Day 1, Part 2
- In Search of Silicon Valley: Day 1
- Developers and Startups Match Making
- Go to an Unconference: Meet Smart, Friendly People with Big Ideas
- A List Apart Web Design Survey, 2008
- Spread Firefox, Make a World Record
- Moving My Blog to Django
- Just Friends FriendFeed
- No More Link Splicing
2007
- MySpace Marketing 1-2-3
- Back
- Google Maps Widgets
- Recruitment Drive
- Advertising in Social Networks
- Capturing Time Zone with JavaScript
- Facebook Platform: Some Thoughts on What I've Learned so Far
- Too Young to Start a Business
- The Joy of pdb.set_trace()
- The A List Apart Web Design Survey
- Coloured Grepping
- NO2ID ID-Day, 26th March 2007
- Inspecting CSS in Python with cssutils
- On Chiho Aoshima at Gloucester Road
- Open Source Success
- Meeting Scott Keiller, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility for Starbucks UK
- Starbucks, Oxfam and freelance Campaigning
2006
- Cycle Cambodia Photos Now Up
- Cycle Cambodia Route Data
- Back from Cycling Cambodia
- Strip Tags in a Vim Buffer
- Plotting Server Performance
- Djangoogle
- Kraftwerk
- Simple Hands Free
- Pétrus
- The Social Web
- Make It Minimal
- MobMart Items of the Day, Prizes to Be Won!
- Regularity Is a Symptom of Bad Code
- Chemistry on the Mind
- X_ORANGE_ID
- html2textile
- Introducing MobMart, My Employer
- TA Capitulate
- Keeping Hold of Digital Memories
- A Vim in TextMate Clothing
- The Death of TextAmerica
- Sleeptracker
- Leave the Walled Garden, Increase ARPU
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- London 2.0
- Concurrent Functional Programming
- Ad-supported Telephony
- The Haskell Highway
- Global Challenge: Cambodia
- Aggregate Operations in Shell
- Doctests vs Unit Tests
- Testing Django Apps
- Web 2.0 Logo Jam
- Syncasting
- The 11th Lie of the Entrpreneur
- Moblog Valentine's Competition!
- Give Your Customers Free Data
- Burn the Feed at Both Ends
- Words of Advice for Impetuous Business People
- Technorati: Let Me In!
- First Impressions Count
- Mobile Web: The 1% of Functionality We Use All the Time
- Mobile Opportunities
- Citizen Journalism?
- Data Vampires
- Hijax
- From Hacker to Businessman: Changing Views
- Google Is My Dawg
- Monetised Moblogs
2005
- Tour Eiffel Success
- Afternoon vs. Technokitten
- Trying Stuff on for Size
- Wow!
- All Tomorrow's Parties
- Django Get-go
- Web 2.0: Emergent Information Organisation
- Required Google Analytics Post
- The Business of Blogging
- Thoughts on Django
- Web Frameworks Night and the Attack of the Alpha Geeks
- The $100 Laptop
- DE9 | Transitions
- Keys
- Diggin' in the Crates
- Open Source Audio Editing
- Generative Art Matures
- New Photography
- Live Reaktions
- Venezuela Madness
- "He May Be a sonofabitch, but He's Our sonofabitch."
- Basayev in the Light
- Restaurant Gordon Ramsay
- London Terror Bombs; City Not on Fire
- Pledgin'
- Creative Commons
- Watch Out!
- Plone Test Drive
- Content Versioning
- Zope 3: A New Frontier
- Confusion Management Systems
- Bike Auction
- Humph
- The Opera
- Reply from My MP About ID Cards
2004
- InfoCMS Update
- NO2ID
- Loan Records
- MultiInfoCMS
- phphierarchy.py
- China Economic
- Iraq Politic
- Prague to Krakow, Afternoon Style
- Python Wrapper to Take the Pain out of the Units Command
- Ahhhh Ha Hahaha!
- ISP Fun
- Chocks in No Way Away
- Reason Max
- Don't Send to Sender, Unix-style
- Tiger Thoughts
- More Foundy Squeeky Afternoon Action
- chkconfig
- NotGeorge
- A New CMS Is Born
- Chuck It, Rude Boy!
- The Liberal Democrat Force
- Safari Form Values
- Shapeshifter Broke My Mac!
- Voting Tomorrow
- Political Adjunct
- More NotCon
- NotCon '04
- Fabric Boss!
- SQL Queries Considered Sportier Than Expected
- Conversation Volume
- V&A
- Hello Pixelsurgeons!
- London Blog Meet
- Permanent Logins with PHP Sessions
- Milestone 6
- Milestone 5 Complete
- Social Software and Sociopaths
- Milestone 4 and Much of 5
- Master and Commander
- Schmocial Schmoftware
- DnD Relaxation
- Another Hype Progress Update
- Cycling in London Rocks
- Hypothetical 2 Progress
- Shirky's Rules of Group Behaviour
- Monster
- Thought
- Old Design = Boring
- Mmm, rsync
- Weddings and That
- More XSLT: Functional Style
- Vim Colours
- Prog2a
- The Passion of Christ
- Continuations
- Extreme Programming, Kind Of
- Kenya, Finally
- phpCollab
- Cluster
- Build Process
- irssi
- Bye Bye www-style
- No Blogging, No Webmonkey
- text-shadow
- This Is Your Brain on Brainfuck
- Home Again, Home Again
- See You in Two...
- 24
- gf
- Oh Yeah...
- Close Proximity
- Lost in Translation
- What the Future Holds
- WorldPay Sucks
- My First JNI Function
- I Believe
- Encode Project Knowledge in XML
2003
- Xmas Lard
- There's Always Time for XSLT
- Caution
- Metaaaaal!
- Friends Page
- Vim Regular Expressions
- Proce55ing
- Site-specific Stylesheets
- Partay!
- Mac OS X Panther Mail.app Junk Mail Bug and Workaround
- PHP 5
- More IA Stuff
- George Soros and American Supremacy
- UIE
- Vim Tip
- Card Sorting
- "Best Tip of All"
- :Filetype Indent Plugin On
- Autocommands
- ]P
- SUPER YAY!
- More Vim Hacks
- Vi iMproved Usage Improved
- Patterns
- I Like
- It's EFF Banner Day!
- Certified!
- Public Discussion
- Hypercapitalisation
- Blaargh
- Web Writing Style Guide
- The Cast of Musical Elephants
- SJCP Revision 2
- Gaming, Doom Style
- CSS Hacks
- Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You by kid606
- Leslie Godfrey, RIP
- IE Doesn't Like Floats Inside Position:relative; Blocks
- Tests and Hacks
- Windows on a Mac
- Some More Basic Synthesis
- New Book
- More Panthery Bits
- Panther
- A Slightly Bigger Lisp Program
- It's My Birthday
- Kill Bill
- Paypal's Solution to the Multiple Submissions Problem
- Still Trying to Get It
- Music and Computers
- Synthesis
- Dorkbot
- IT People
- "And as we all know from experiments conducted during the Korean War, Diane, sleep deprivation is a one-way ticket to temporary psychosis"
- Javadoc
- The Roses
- London Bloggers Tube Map
- Tempura, Web Apps
- Scheme and Stuff
- Dividends
- Raspberry
- SCJP Revision
- London: 1
- I Found the API Docs
- mod_perl
- Hype Version 2 Redux
- The Last Day of September
- VPNs on OS X
- Rewarding
- Italy Photos Up
- Posts per Month Since I Began
- Tax Return
- Finding Nemo and Many Records!
- Programming with Frames
- The Hours
- Resucitation by Adult.
- Patents, More Lisp
- MySQL Configuration Files
- Italia
- Baby I'm a Lisp Coder Now
- Language Fascism Etc
- BoyInDaCorner by Dizzee Rascal
- My Mum Is 50!
- Ark
- Week in, Week Out
- Appletalk Forwarding Over SSH
- Working Holiday
- Achievement
- Project Managers
- wwWebflow 2.0.3 Ships
- Rapid Response from the Green Party MEP
- Stop EU Software Patents
- Have DSL, Able to Breathe Freely Again
- I've Really Lost It This Time
- Tom Yum
- Blog Birthday
- Carnivale!
- Winning the Battle, and the War
- Credit, Employment, Shopping
- Mille Plateaux
- New Series of Six Feet Under Hits UK Cable
- Accenture First Round Phone Interview
- Am Back
- Holiday
- Highly Recommended
- Installation Ain't Bad
- We're All Going to the Zoo, the Zoo...
- Shoot the Moon
- Busy Universe
- Am I Too Obsessive?
- On Electroclash
- New Sunglasses, Electroclash
- Hulk
- Apple, Why Sendmail?
- New Glasses
- Mozilla Pushed Forward?
- Will Everybody Just Stop Shooting Browsers
- Mo Hype, Mo Money
- Hype Version 2
- Toad in the Hole
- Weekend Gladness
- Blueteeth
- Ack!
- W3C Unresponsive
- MID Action
- ben2 Style
- Giving and Taking
- OmniGraffle Is Great
- More Live Arranger
- Live Arranger View
- My First .Com
- application/rss+xml
- Arguing Day, 2003, Draws to a Close
- Food Glorious Food
- 606660606
- IE Is Dead
- Networking Party Postmortem
- Photos
- Blog Entry
- I M Poweruser
- New Laptop!
- The Stew Was Well Good
- Week in the Rear View Mirror
- Annoying Behaviour
- IE Hack
- Matrix Reloaded
- Donnie Darko
- The Good Girl
- I'm at Peace
- Exhausted
- Rounds by Four Tet
- More Details
- OMFG!
- Powerbook
- Post Dearth
- Oh My Gosh!
- Never Too Many Amen Tunes
- Hoorah!
- Aaaaarrgghghghhhhh
- Meetup
- CSS Suxxors Revisited
- On Google's Fabled Blog Tab
- Russian Ark
- Garden
- Coarse Ground Sea Salt
- Windfall
- Elephant by the White Stripes
- Awwww
- The Elusive CSS Footer
- HTTP Redirects
- Curt Cloninger
- Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Generative Reproduction
- Questions
- iTunes 4
- Good Point from Martwine
- Zeldman!
- BBC News and Some Example Grid Syntax
- Need to Read
- Urge to Kill... Rising...
- An Interesting Suggestion
- Ah Ha!
- 16:49. Restate My Assumptions
- XML Prolog Puts IE 6 into Quirks Mode
- Bugger
- More Discussion
- Hixie Weighs In
- More Feedback
- Some Support!
- Another Problem Layout
- CSS Interface Design
- Teeth, Muscles, Shares
- Bottom-clenchingly Simple Hierarchical Javascript Menus
- Exercise
- Flash in Safari Beta 2
- More Boating
- Google-tastic
- Safari Issue
- The Gallery Is Finished!
- Boating in the Park
- Perhaps I'm Just Too Old
- Mental Note
- Now That's What I Call Gun Control
- Exif/BS
- A Lovely Weekend in the Country
- Estimates
- More Going with the Flow
- Definition
- When Should You Go with a Flow You Don't Like?
- Router Fun
- Things Are Looking Up
- Life of Pi
- Sigh
- Loneliness
- Second Large Failure
- New York, New York!
- If You Want to Go Far Whilst Sitting Down
- New York Looms...
- No!
- Illness
- Interview Debrief
- The Stupid Fluctuating World of freelance.
- FOAF
- Adaptation
- New Mood
- A Couple of Ideas
- And, on a Similar Note
- Blank MIME Emails
- New Design Redux
- New Design
- Harrington Photography Goes Live
- Stop That War!
- Why Hacking Web Pages with Unix Rules
- Human Greybar Land
- Tai Chi, Manga, Guests
- Arena4 Complete
- Tai Chi Lineage
- Bastards!
- New Stuff
2002
- Woo-oooo-oo-ooo
- He Shoots, He Invoices!
- Craxy World of Noon
- Doh!
- More Mouse Things
- BIRTHDAY!!!!
- Activities
- A Nice Sunny Sunday
- Well, the Day Has Gone, but Still
- They Think It's All Over...
- Draws Nearer...
- The Big Day
- Ha Ha!
- New Background
- It Works!
- Coding Time Down At The Farm
- More, More, More!
- l33t Payments
- Plus De Objet D'code
- Mrs Marsh Hired Him to Fix the Jagwar
- Blogger API
- *Another* Project Finished
- Another Project Completed, Late
- JavaScript Magic
- upd
- Fixed ADSL!
- Mo Uploads
- CV
- Ain't No Stoppin'
- Hypothetical Objects
- Tonight's Major Hacking Feat
- Blanket
- Search Term Highlighting
- Journal Code "Finished"
- Helicopters
- Aftnn.org Coming Along
- New Logging Gizmo
- Mmm
- These Guys Suck!
- AFTNN.ORG!
- Mo Stencils
- King of the Beats
- Finding Food in China
- Lucid Dreaming
- Werk at Lurst
- Now Today I'm Depressed
- Smart Moves
- More on Download Times
- Browser Recognition Etc
- Jakob Says...
- Testing 1 2 3
- Paging
- Stencil Graffiti
- Another Web Site Finished!
- PEAR r0x0rz
- Today Hypothetical Was One Year Old
- Hypothetical Help System
- Old Improvements List
- So Cunning Etc Etc
- Well, Since There Are People Reading...
- Handling of Robots
- Testing of Sites
- PHP Masked File Downloads
- A Quickplace Function
- Javascript yes/no
- Hypothetical Remote
- Alt Tags on Buttons
- Karting and Stuff
- Ideas from Greymatter
- You've Been Sued!
- POP3 Mail App
2001
- More of Mat's Hypotheses
- User Validation
- Notes from the Living Room
- iBook and Hack-em-ups
- Hype 2 Accessibility
- v0.2 Speeling
- I Love HTML
- Stealing from Oracle
- Webthought 2222
- Louise's Birthday
- More Solid PHP Know-how
- Default Values in PHP
- Is This What a Working Flash Detect Javascript Looks Like?
- Button Generation Refinements
- Mat Said...
- Need for a New Db
- Hypothetical 2 Proceeding Quite Well
- Hypothetical 2 on Route
- Hype Suggestions
- drawFrame
- BODMAS
- Textmap - an Old Idea
- Comments ON
- News Serialisation
- Mo Hype2
- Hype2 Notes
- Case Sensitivity
- Portlet/theme Enhancements
- It's Wierd (2)
- It's Wierd
- Mail Page Is a Bit Abrupt
- ADSL + Linux + iptables
- Brass Eye Related Government Communication!
- Commas!
- These Tunes Rock...
- Autolinks Notes
- Afternoon Known Issue
- Handy Script for Floppies
- Hypo Trouble
- ADSL Is _REALLY_ **EXCITING**
- It's a Long Road to Psion
- Psion World
- Autolinksss
- Emus + Extensions
- Today I Got...
- Look, It's Started...
- Auto-links Refinements
- Another Blogdex-inspired Idea
- Eh Oh
- I Made This
- Customisable Image Colours for Hypo
- Admin Page SUX0Rz, WAP Site Also
- Well
- Log Now Part of cityroad.org.uk
- User Services
- Known Issues from a-new-hope.txt (Legacy Notes File)
- Is That Really Why You Made a Weblog?
- Wilkommen!