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?