Oh hi, Iʼm Ben.
Iʼm an Engineering Manager at Meta.
I like to make things.
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
- At Christmas 1994 the NME carried a mixtape from the Chemical Brothers (still known as the Dust Brothers at that point). I lost my copy ages ago, but it was probably warped to shit from all the times I played it. This track was the highlight. I don’t think I’ve heard it since then. It’s insane to think that was almost 20 years ago. O.M.G. I’m practically dead now. Edit: Lo and behold, somebody’s kindly posted the entire NME Xmas Dust Up mixtape to Mixcloud. Enjoy!
- 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
- I R Media-Whore
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
- I don't want to work any more
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"
- Cunting work
- 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
- I hate spammers
- 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
- Fuck!
- 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.
- I want your sexiness!
- 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
- Window size arses
- 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
- Double-entry!!! Har har!
- 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
- Green theme IE/4.5/Mac fuck-UP
- 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
- Arsecandle
- 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!