Hey, I'm Ben

I build delightful user experiences that are fast, accessible, responsive, and maintainable. I also try to enable others to do the same

More About Ben

Blog

You Own Your Career

You're the one who chooses to be a generalist, specialist, or some combination

The Biggest News of 2022 Measured by Font Size

For the last couple years, I've been keeping track of the font size of the headlines on cnn.com

No, this isn't over-complicated, it's just complicated

“Why are we over-complicating this?” is a very easy thing to say after being introduced to a project. What's hard is to reserve judgement until you've educated yourself on the entire problem domain, and noted all the considerations that were made by previous developers.

The Problem with Monorepos and Shared Libraries

There’s a unique problem with monorepos and shared libraries that often gets overlooked

Guess and Pray Debugging

How to be painfully slow at debugging

The No-Nonsense Styling Method

The “No-Nonsense Styling Method” is a set of guidelines that I've compiled that makes styling less surprising and more predictable.

Amateurs talk implementation; professionals talk interfaces

There's an interesting quote that is often credited to Omar Bradley (1893-1981), the last five-star officer of the United States. It goes like this...

Blame Tooling, Not People

Tooling is much more effective than people at preventing mistakes, encouraging patterns, and discouraging anti-patterns.

The Biggest News of 2021 Measured by Font Size

For the last year, I've been keeping track of the font size of the headlines on cnn.com

How to Mangle your git History

Wondering how you can increase your job security? Here are a few handy ways that you can make it difficult for your co-workers to read through your git history.

Announcing redux-injectors 2.0

It's been a long time coming, but redux-injectors 2.0 is here

Portfolio

FP Advisor Case Study

FP Advisor is Canada’s largest database of corporate information. It's a product of the same team behind the Financial Post. It’s a useful resource, but because of the age of the website it had various accessibility concerns and was beginning to look outdated.

I was consulted at the beginning of the project to do some initial setup work. I created a good project structure, created some layouts, and added some accessible components (such as textboxes, navs, footers, etc.)

The new site looks great on both mobile and desktop and is very accessible. It has accessibility features such as a “Skip Navigation” button, all the interactive controls have focus states and labels, and the complex widgets are built with the latest accessibility best practices.

Postmedia Hub Case Study

Postmedia Hub is a marketing analytics platform included free of charge to any Postmedia Marketing customer. I've consulted with various projects related to The Hub including helping make it mobile friendly and accessible.

Consulting

I currently only take projects that are both well-paid and interesting. If your project fits that criteria, you can pitch it to me here (I'm especially interested in helping organizations become compliant with accessibility laws):

consulting@lorantfy.com