Ben Howdle

There are two scenarios I keep seeing with AI in production, and they are the same scenarios in different disguises.

At some point in every codebase's life, you fix the same bug three times in one afternoon.

There's a game you play as a kid - music plays, a potato gets passed around the circle (ours was a beanbag, I think, or somebody's shoe - the potato was always theoretical), and the only rule anyone actually remembers is that you do not want to be the one…

The Pattern Underneath the Pattern I've spent fifteen years building software.

A Letter to My Younger Self Before Their First Talk Dear 2013 me, You're about to step on stage, or...stand up in front a bunch of web developers in London.

Introduction - The Accidental Era of "AI First" Over the last two years, you've probably noticed a strange vibe in the software world: everyone is moving at impossible speed while simultaneously questioning if any of this will matter in five years.

Devdle is a Wordle-inspired daily puzzle app I built for developers to solve coding challenges.

Securing a Banking System's UI and API The below was a talk delivered at fintech_devcon in August 2025 in Denver, CO.

AI Can Help You Write Code - But It Can't Help You Think The hardest part of software engineering has never been the syntax.

There's a strange delay in engineering leadership no one warns you about.

Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Journey" There's a running joke in engineering circles that if you sit still long enough, someone will come along and replace your perfectly functional code with the latest framework named after a fruit, bi…

Introduction No matter the size of the company or the maturity of the codebase, there's one question I've found myself asking time and time again when tackling a new task: Is there an existing solution I need to augment, or do I need to solve this from sc…

A great engineering team doesn't need constant oversight.

Introduction After 15 years in software engineering and engineering leadership-ranging from IC (individual contributor) roles to CTO-I've seen countless engineers thrive (or struggle) based on how well their working style aligns with the company's needs at

TypeScript has become the de facto standard for building robust, maintainable, and scalable JavaScript applications.

The Illusion of Realtime in Computing In software development, we often talk about "realtime" as if it's a definitive concept-messages sent instantly, updates reflected immediately, data synchronized across systems without delay.

A structured approach to writing reliable software by progressing and ascending through three distinct levels of quality assurance.

Securing a Bank UI How I Didn't Lose Any Customer's Money And Retained My Sanity Throughout Before I joined Clerk, I was a fintech CTO for nearly 6 years, with 4 years at Letter and 2 years with WorkMade.

Leadership in engineering isn't just about writing code or managing timelines-it's about creating an environment where teams thrive, products succeed, and everyone grows along the way.

"Alright, five years ago, right before Thanos, I was in a place called the Quantum Realm.

"We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." – Alan Watts The world is built on systems.

Predicting Unpredictable Bugs & Testing Distributed Systems Or, "No-One Expected Dennis Nedry But Maybe Could Have Better Prepared For His Actions" Dr.

How I manage time off and schedule in new work AKA "Asynchronous Pipeline Building", but more on that below...

Thanks to Pete Lacey’s tweet, I decided to turn the inability I was facing to come up with some useful concepts to blog about, into writing a post on the inability most people seem to face on starting something.

Intro This post should serve as general observations and remarks on my own personal experience using both Vue and React for production applications and services, as opposed to simply drawing you in to a VUE VS.

I recently re-designed my personal site after not touching it since December 2015.

WebSockets…and React Native Amongst other things, highlights include: Building a command line interface in the browser for test engineers to remotely debug scripts they’re running Fine-tuning the performance of the UI to handle hundreds of messages a seco…

Speculo Speculo is an easy way to visualise colour palettes.

I really didn't want to bum people out with this post, so that's why I've named it after a Take That song, as opposed to a Smiths song (was going with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now...with Web Development").

Aim Provide a sane way for a user to search our static Jekyll blog and view a bookmarkable page containing the relevant results.

Permeate iOS app → Intro I've been a web developer for 4 and a bit years now, primarily using JavaScript & Node.js to build web apps.

iHi.im → Preamble Jack Smith and myself made a web app a couple of years ago called iHi.

Making elements the same height Sometimes you might have a need to grab a few elements, and then make them the same height.

A constant barrage of "new things" When I started back in 2009, I remember having a handful of bookmarks that I used to scour for all the information I could lay my hands on...

Everyone and their mother is now telling you to "stick your site on GitHub", but if you don't know what a GitHub is or the idea of forking, pushing and committing freaks the hell out of you, then I hope this short guide will at least help you overcome tho…

Controlling navigation in a large client-side application As more and more applications are moving to the browser, we're now finding ourselves having to fix some of the already solved paradigms, ie. navigation.

They're also decisions and choices in disguise A while ago, I saw this Dribbble shot from Morgan Allan Knutson and I have to say, other than thinking the design of the poster was visually pleasing, the message on the poster didn't really mean that much to…

Kill your output with premature optimisation "Design Patterns", "Code architecture", "Scalability", "OOP", "Maintainability", "The code you write now, is the legacy code of the future", "Be kind to your future self" & "Code smells".

Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: "Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible.

This post is a re-publish from an article I did for .Net Magazine back in September, 2012.

"Side projects, yo!"

Backbone is awesome.

This post isn't going to go too much in depth about what Jekyll is, but more how to get going with it insanely quickly, however; Jekyll is a static-site generator.

Backbone is frickin' awesome.

Any guesses as to which will alert first?

In the relatively brief time I've spent learning to design and develop, I've learnt a great amount but the most scary and humbling thing I've learnt is what I still have left to learn.

The JavaScript below is perfectly legal, it grabs a DOM element that doesn't exist and then sets it's text.

I must hear the word "API" about 20+ times a day.

Today, I released Heisenberg.js, a project base for building modern JavaScript applications.

I believe that passion is the underlying reason why people and products succeed.