About Ben Ward

I’m Ben Michael Ward, a 24 (born 1984-02-09) year old software and web developer from near Cambridge. I’m a Computation graduate of the University of Manchester and currently employed as a Web Developer by Yahoo in London.

I’m enthused by the web, music, design and photography. But mostly the web. I built my first website with Microsoft Frontpage Express at the age of 15 and built my first good website a number of years later. Since 2003 I’ve become aware of and active in the web standards community, evangelising best practice, semantics and working as a community admin at microformats.org.

I’m a principled believer that you, the person reading or listening to this website, has the right to resize it, recolour it, rearrange it and mess with it to your personal satisfaction using whatever client-side technology is available to you. The ‘pixel perfect internet’ does not and shan’t ever exist, so we shouldn’t try to fake it. Frankly, any website that actively tries to prevent people remixing their web is only wasting valuable bandwidth that could better serve up pictures of kittens.

You can read my CV for more professional information, but please note that I’m not currently looking for work.

I cook well, design on paper first and also get an inexplicable placebo effect from taking Paracetamol, whereby headaches are eased by the taste of chalk. My earliest memory is aged three, laying length-ways along a flight of stairs and attempting to roll down them one at a time. My earliest missing memory is what happened next.

I’m recognised in a few places elsewhere on the internet as Shovel which dates back to some long gone days when I played the game Quake online.

The photograph of me at the head of this page was taken by Hanni Ross.