Hi, I'm Ben 😊
Writing
Infrequent notes & strong opinions weakly held, usually about designing, building & shipping user interfaces for the web.
2020
- I rebuilt this blog with Tropical
- Non-iPhone burst photos in Apple's Photos apps
- A video pipeline for iCloud Photos
2019
2018
2017
2015
- Notes on 2015
- Dutch PHP Conference 2015
- Smarter CSS builds with Webpack
- Testing Flux Stores without Jest
- My CSS in 2014
2014
- BEM modifiers: multiple classes vs @extend
- Alternatives to Compass
- Server-rendered React components in Rails
2013
Side Projects
Tropical
A flexible, component-first static site generator.
Frustrated with the priorities and tradeoffs in popular static site frameworks, I made one with different priorities.
benandcamilla.in
I’ve been privileged enough to travel all over the world with my bff. While seeing the sights, meeting new friends and tasting the food, we’ve taken some photos.
benandcamilla.in is a hand-rolled photoblog and an experimental attempt at doing big, beautiful photo stories faster, better and simpler than the big publishing platforms.
Dormant projects
- Give Weekly: a newsletter aimed at directing some help to a single good cause
- TIL: a microblog and an experiment with a git-powered mobile publishing workflow
- Dragster: better HTML5 drag events
- Viewloader: JS components from the pre-component era
- Style: an opinionated starting point for a scalable, maintainable CSS architecture
Working
Rght place, right time. After dabbling in a few 🚤 career 🤖 options 🎬 I found myself in the then-new-ish field of web design, in a city with a selfishly large share of the industry's best & brightest to learn from.
I've been building things at Envato for the last little while.
Elsewhere
I write open source code and build side projects on GitHub, act like a professional on LinkedIn and am usually the human behind bensmithett everywhere else.
Be kind, assume good intentions and always buy the tourist photo.