Hi, I’m Ben 😊

Writing

Infrequent notes & strong opinions weakly held, usually (but not exclusively!) about designing, building & shipping user interfaces for the web.

2019

• An argument against lazy loading
• Farewell, Figure & Allihoopa 😢

2018

• Top left to bottom right

2017

• The Internet in Cuba
• Redesign!

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

• Declarative JS components with viewloader.js
• Keyboard shortcuts and disabling autocorrect on HTML inputs
• Stop using so many Sass variables.

Side Projects

San Blas

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 best friend. 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 attempt to show that big, beautiful photo stories can be done faster, better and simpler independent of the behemoth publishing platforms.

Dormant projects

• Give Weekly: a (semi-) weekly 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

In a case of right place right time, after dabbling in a few 🚤 career 🤖 options 🎬 I found myself in the new-ish field of web design, in a city with an selfishly large share of the industry’s best & brightest to learn from.

I’ve been building user interfaces at Envato since 2011.

Speaking

I’ve presented talks on web design and development at local meetups, at work and at the occasional conference. Public speaking still terrifies me.

• The 12MB Web Page: A tale of perfect PageSpeed scores & developer happiness (Envato Code Party, May 2016) slides
• The UI is an Application (Dutch PHP Conference, Jun 2015) slides
• Hands on with the modern front end stack workshop (Dutch PHP Conference, Jun 2015) slides code
• The New Front End Stack: A really really really high level introduction (Envato Code Party, May 2015) slides
• Smarter Sass builds with Webpack (MelbCSS, Apr 2015 & MelbJS, May 2015) slides
• Faking Real Time: Optimistic Updates & Eventual Consistency (Decompress, Mar 2015) slides
• Styling Components with JavaScript: MelbCSS Edition (MelbCSS, Dec 2014) slides
• Presenting Dev Achievements to Non-Devs (Envato Code Party, Nov 2014)
• Styling Components with JavaScript (MelbJS, Sep 2014) slides
• Going Isomorphic with React (MelbJS, Jul 2014) slides
• CSS Architecture on a Shoestring (Decompress, Apr 2014) slides
• Element Queries: Responsive Web Design’s Unicorn (Be Responsive, Jan 2014) video slides
• Browser Extensions vs Your JavaScript (MelbJS, Mar 2013) video slides

Elsewhere

I write open source code and build side projects on GitHub, suit up on LinkedIn and am usually the human behind bensmithett everywhere else.

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Be kind. Assume good intentions. Always buy the tourist photo.