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Hi, I'm Ben 😊

Writing

Infrequent notes & strong opinions weakly held, usually about designing, building & shipping user interfaces for the web.

2020

2019

2018

2017

2015

2014

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.