Hi, I’m Ben. I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Southampton and this is my blog. This is just a short post to kick things off.
What to expect
I’m not entirely sure how this will shape up but I wanted a place to write and share my thoughts. I’m not going to bombard you with adverts, I’m not going to ask to send notifications and I’m not going to add annoying pop ups. The focus here is the content. As I learn new concepts or techniques, discover new tools or learn new skills, I’ll post about them here.
My journey
Around the start of Secondary school, I began learning Photoshop. I had long been interested in photography since my dad was a photographer, but I soon started getting interested in web design. Wanting to make my ideas a reality, I then began making simple webpages in Dreamweaver (using tables!).
I was hooked. Soon after I delved into the world of programming, using Codecademy and Treehouse to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This was shortly followed by an introduction to back-end web development in the form of Ruby on Rails.
Once I got comfortable with Rails, I built Revisionhub to track my studying. I’ve still got a lot of ideas for this site but it helped me a lot when I was taking my A-levels.
Last year, I started university and was introduced to Java and developing for desktop. I hadn’t done much outside of websites before and I really enjoyed it. Going forward, I’m excited to learn more and maybe have a look at Android.
About the site
This site is made with Jekyll, a static site generator that’s blog aware. I’ve used the Kasper theme with some modifications and set it up to be hosted on Netlify with automatic deploys from Github.
Side note, I was impressed how well Netlify works and how much control it gives you to revert, preview or roll back to different builds. I watched some videos from Chris Coyier and I couldn’t believe how powerful it is. I would definitely recommend it.
Where can you find me?
You can find my projects on Github (although not much is public right now) and you can send me an email at contact@benwtks.com. Please feel free to share this post and send me your comments or questions on Twitter.