Please note that I am very happily employed at Twitter and not looking for new full-time opportunities at this time. Thank you.
Ben Michael Ward
- ben@benward.me
- Web
- http://benward.me
- Code
- http://github.com/benward
- A thoughtful and creative web developer.
- Passionate about the technology of the web, openness, and communication.
- Experienced building developer platforms, tools, and APIs.
Skills
Web Development
Expert front-end engineer in standards-based development using HTML, CSS, and high performance JavaScript, microformats, and ARIA.
Experience maintaining large-scale web applications and tools with Scala, Ruby, and PHP, with MySQL, Apache, and Nginx.
Advocate and evangelist for web standards technologies such as HTML5, related APIs and CSS3.
Creative contributor to entire product development process; communicates ideas rigorously.
Produces clear and accessible documentation for developers, and can communicate with application users.
Design
Good design eye, happiest in close collaboration with user experience designers. Decent working knowledge of layout and typographic style.
Also
Passion for good user interface and user experience design.
Experience
Staff Software Engineer
Technical lead for Twitter for Websites.
- Responsible for of embeddable widgets; Tweet buttons, embedded Tweets, timelines.
- Writing cross-browser, cross-device, performance-optimised JavaScript for third party integration.
- Major contributor to the Twitter developer platform over years.
- Built features for twitter.com, Twitter for Websites, web and mobile.
- Built endpoints for the Twitter API, developer tools, OAuth.
Software Applications Development Engineer
Front-end developer at the Yahoo Developer Network.
- Designing and building developer platform participation and collaboration tools.
- Major contributor to analysis, design and specification of a large publishing CMS project.
- Developed various designs and tools around developer information sharing and collaboration both in public and within in an international organisation of 13,000 co-workers.
Software Applications Development Engineer
Engineer on Fire Eagle.
Worked on application design, user experience and front end implementation of geo-platform-based Facebook application for social sharing of location.
Contributed to product ideation and brainstorming for future Brickhouse projects.
Wrote ‘ OAuth Best Practices’ documentation for using OAuth with Fire Eagle, still referenced and praised by major OAuth contributors and application developers.
Specification Editor & Author, Community Admin
An active contributor to the successful community driven, structured-data organisation, microformats.org.
- Specification editor for multiple microformats specifications and patterns.
- Credited author of the recipe microformat and other lower-level patterns.
- Promoted to community admin by peers.
A summary of work is part of my microformats.org user page.
Education
Computation with Industrial Experience BSc
Awarded Upper Second-Class Honours
Includes a final year software developer project (designed and engineered a personal document management application); awarded First Class grade.
Also includes 14-month software development internship; awarded First Class grade.
4 A-Levels
Hills Road Sixth
Form College, Cambridge
(
Computing, Mathematics, Government & Politics. Modern History (AS level).
Affiliates
- Administrator, editor, at microformats.org.
Interests
I cook, take photographs and periodically take up drawing. I play the guitar and indulge in live music. I blog at benward.me, and about food at munchmun.ch.
Since 2014 I've co-hosted a music radio show on San Francisco's BFF.FM.
Prevously a speaker at Barcamps, Social Web Foocamp, WebCamp, BlogTalk, BBC Mashed, and Open Web Camp.