Welcome

This is my blog, and it even has RSS.

Posted 4th June 2014 15:21 byBen Basson

Welcome to my humble blog - I've nicknamed it "Bang Head On Desk" as a homage to a (mostly) metaphorical stage of software development, usually caused by building on the digital equivalent of quicksand (also known as things that other people wrote).

Who am I?

I am Ben Basson; a lead developer at Fivium, where I've had the enormous privilege to work with the industry-leading Oracle Database experts and other hugely talented developers from a variety of backgrounds. I've been there since 2008, and it's a great company.

I'm currently the lead developer for eCase, a web system that helps Government departments to log, distribute, manage and respond to the vast amount of correspondence that they receive (typically 50,000+ letters or substantive emails per year, per department).

What is my experience?

I've worked a lot with the typical Oracle stack of Java, SQL, PL/SQL and XML along with web-tier staples of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Previously at Fivium, I have:

  • Built a payment module to integrate our systems with RBS WorldPay.
  • Written code to generate web services from existing system markup.
  • Built a system to manage and improve the quality of Oil & Gas licence data held by the Government (a data set spanning 50 years and several generations of computing hardware and software).
  • Worked on some incredibly complicated GIS processing routines.
  • Helped to re-architect our underlying technology to bring it up to date and keep it relevant for the next decade.
  • Conducted over 100 technical interviews.

In terms of side projects, I've done a ton of JavaScript and a bit of Ruby.

What will this blog be about?

Primarily it's going to be about software development, the majority of which should be educational rather than rant-based (but there will be rants, oh yes).

I've had a lot of interesting projects over the years, and I can't recall one where there wasn't something worth sharing. My intent is to start out with things I learned from more recent projects (such as building this website), but I'm hoping to cover a lot of old ground as well.

There's an RSS feed…

Yes, in the "age" of Twitter I am a digital dinosaur that still thinks a list of updates via an XML protocol is a good thing. If you do too, maybe we'll agree on some other stuff.

Why not subscribe and find out?