Hello! I'm Ben Griffiths. I live in Cambridge, I make things, and this is where I write about them.
The serious bit
I’ve been a software engineer for twenty-five years and I’ve had the good fortune to work on some things that mattered. I was on the small team that built the first public prototype of GOV.UK, with the job of keeping the code honest. I co-founded Reevoo and was CTO at Makielab, where we made BAFTA-nominated 3D-printed dolls and I wrote the software that drove the printers. I was the first Head of Technology at dxw, and at Go Free Range I led research projects for BBC R&D. Along the way I helped found the London Ruby Users Group, contributed early code to Selenium, Mocha and PHPUnit, and gave a couple of talks I’m still fond of.
These days I write a lot of Elm, use AI tools heavily and thoughtfully, and am interested in what agentic engineering does to the craft. The full story is on LinkedIn. I’m open to interesting work.
The making things bit
I make things for fun. Lots of things. A text adventure player with a Z-machine written in Elm. A composer for hand-cranked music box tapes. A faster page for the Guardian cryptic that now solves anagrams. A tool for making paper standees. A recreation of the program I learned machine code from in 1985. Whatever’s currently eating my evenings is on the home page, and the rest are on the projects page. I also make things out of wood and restore old tools, which produces fewer blog posts but more sawdust.
The D&D bit
I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for most of my life and for a while I did it for a living, running paid online campaigns on StartPlaying. I’ve written two Monster of the Week mysteries set in Cambridge, a prompt deck for new roleplayers, and I’m currently building a better character sheet because the official one annoys me. I’m always up for a game.
The rest
I don’t take any of this too seriously, and I’d gently suggest you don’t either. My son says my macaroni cheese is the tastiest meal imaginable, but between you and me, it’s mainly MSG.
Say hello on Mastodon at @beng@mastodon.social or email me.