What is this newsletter about?
And who is this "Ben Christel" character, anyway?
Hello!
I’m Ben Christel. I’m going to be using this space to write about software development and design. Expect pragmatic, hype-free posts about once a week.
Topics
I care a lot about the experiences of people who use and make software. (This is, admittedly, selfish, as I’m both a user and a maker.) Computers are hard—in different ways—for everyone. If we don’t take care to make our computing experiences good, they’ll be bad. Frustrating. Economically unrewarding, even.
If you’re like me, you want to do better.
But while good intentions are noble, they aren’t enough to get good outcomes. Even if we care about our coworkers and customers, we’ll still write buggy, unmaintainable software if that’s the best we know how to do. To make software better, we need (at least) two things:
better views — ways of looking at the system.
better techniques — ways of doing things to the system.
This newsletter will cover the views and techniques that I’ve found most useful during my decade-plus of writing code professionally.
If that sounds intriguing, hit the “subscribe now” button below. Substack won’t spam you. You’ll just get my future posts delivered straight to your email.
About Me
I write code and put it on GitHub.
You can find some of my other writing on my blog and my personal wiki.
I currently work at Khan Academy.
I previously worked at Pivotal (acquired by VMware in 2020).
I started programming in 1998, and got my first full-time job (writing Ruby for Groupon) in 2012. Since then, I’ve done professional work in JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, C, Scala, and Bash.
I hope you’ll join me on this adventure!