About Ben Allen

About me

I am:

• British but living in Cleveland, OH
• Senior Product Manager at GitHub, helping make GitHub's products accessible
• A Chicagoan of 8.5 years and a huge fan of the city - the place, the people, the restaurants (but sadly not the winter)
• A pythonista practising over at Python Morsels
• Alumni of the University of St. Andrews School of Computer Science

I am on:

• LinkedIn - I use it as a social network for business colleagues & clients
• GitHub - day job, and random code ideas
• Twitter @benjaminallen - more of a Twitter reader than a writer

My hobbies and passions include:

• Clean Energy
• Electric cars
• Python

About this blog

Test, learn, grow - that, selfishly, is what I want to do but it's also what I would encourage everyone in the web business to do - learn by doing. There is no better substitute, in my humble opinion. You can learn more about test, learn, grow in my first proper blog post.

Inspiration

I've been inspired by many people:

• my old boss Dave Wallace
• my university Computer Science sidekick Andrew McCarthy
• work mentors Rew Islam, Alex Sandrey, Peter Pearce
• my old Chicago partner in crime John Walsh

Setting up the blog, sorting out principles, goals etc. has largely been inspired by Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is an awesome author and blogger. Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik was quite literally the first blog I had read with great content, presented in a style that was understandable and meaningful to me. This experience changed my perception of blogs as a medium (I'm sure loads of good quality blogs were out there before Avinash but alas I lead a sheltered life).

Another shout out has to go to Jakob Nielsen. Without reading Jakob's excellent book and his alertbox articles I would have never been interested in web usability or human computer interface design (and I'd probably be a less annoyed web snob).

Image attribution

Images used on this blog come from 2 sources:

• Me!
• The excellent unDraw - open source illustrations.

Legal-ish bit

This blog conveys the point of view of Ben Allen, not the view of past, present or future employers. Phew – glad we got that out there!