Hi, I'm Ben 😊

Writing

Infrequent notes, technical rabbit holes & strong opinions weakly held.

2020

• I rebuilt this blog with Tropical
• Non-iPhone burst photos in Apple's Photos apps
• A video pipeline for iCloud Photos

2019

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

2018

• Avoid CSS margin confusion

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
• Stop using so many Sass variables

Side Projects

Tropical

Frustrated with the priorities and tradeoffs in popular modern static site generators, I made one for building fast, mostly-just-HTML static sites with islands of client-side JS.

Coexist

A pattern for server rendering pages from JS when using non-JS frameworks like Rails.

benandcamilla.in

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
• Dragster: better HTML5 drag events
• Viewloader: JS components from the pre-component era
• Style: an opinionated starting point for a scalable, maintainable CSS architecture