Hello,

I’m Ben (also willcodefortea). I write code and take pictures, sometimes things appear here.

I got into programming at university while I was studying physics. The elegance of theories, their derivations and implications fascinated me from an early age, but I never found an area I really loved. I found ones I hated sure, (looking at you cosmology), but none that I wanted to study further. When we had to do some modelling in C however, I discovered that that same elegance could be found here. For me, programming is all about that elegance, and the puzzle hidden in the noise. Oh people would pay you to do them?!

Count. Me. In.

I’ve been working in startups for around 10 years, primarily with Python and Typescript. I’ve been on the Engineering Manager track for a few of those and had to switch up my skillset. Here’s a list of ever growing books that helped me out.

You can find me in all the usual places :)

Technologies I’m looking to learn in 2023

• Build a compiler
• Professional AWS Solutions Architect (THIS TIME)
• TrueLayer
• Rust
• Cloudflare Workers
• [More things as I think of them]

Technologies I’m looking to learn in 2022

• GitHub actions ✅
  • Extremely useful and very easy to create CI/CD pipelines
• Smart Contracts
  • Massively lost interest in all things blockchain. The philosophy is great, the reality less so.
• Haskell (finally.)
  • Still not spent time with this, but have leaned into partially-functional approaches in my day to day programming
• Terraform ✅
  • plan + apply with state > cloudformation
• CDK ✅
  • It’s fine, but the notion of an imperative language to manage infrastructure gives me the heebie jeebies
• Professional AWS Solutions Architect
  • I’ve been wanting to tick this box for a few years… Maybe next year.