All about Ben

I am a tea-drinking designer, programmer and musician in Grantham, UK, who also happenes to be a student; studying computing, maths and design for my A-levels and hoping to study CS at university. I work for Agincourt building stuff with Ruby/Rails and PHP. You can listen to my music on SoundCloud.

I love programming. As well as being comfortable with Ruby and PHP, I am currently learning C, Python and Scala too. I use Rails and Yii for building web apps and Wordpress for basic blogs. I manage code using Git and GitHub. I proudly use a Mac and I’m familiar with Linux. I like to think I’m a HTML/CSS genius and I employ jQuery for the crazy stuff.

My on-the-go machine is a 2008 aluminium MacBook – its had plenty of use, with a cracked (but working) trackpad and a few dents on the sides. The CPU is starting to feel slow though, especially when making music, so I’m looking to replace it soon. I’ve also built a Hackintosh but the hassle with keeping it running means I’ll be switching to a MacBook-only setup when I upgrade.

Most of my time is spent editing text in Vim which is wonderfully extensible, portable and lightweight. Sparrow and Skype serve my email and chat addiction. Alfred is the app that I never see but couldn’t live without. A combination of Dropbox and Git keeps all my data versioned and accessible from any machine. For a near-perfect DAW, look no further than Ableton Live.

Audio gear includes a pair of Rokit RP5 studio monitors – which are easily the best things I’ve ever heard. I’ve also got a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface, an NI Audio 8 DJ interface, an M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard, an M-Audio Xponent DJ controller and a tiny Behringer B5 condenser mic.

Contact

If you want to get in touch, drop me an email at ben@bnhymn.com, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.