Ben Ward

Please note that I am very happily employed at Twitter and not looking for new full-time opportunities at this time. Thank you.

Ben Michael Ward

Email
ben@benward.me
Web
http://benward.me
Code
http://github.com/benward

Skills

Expert front-end engineer in using , , , and high performance , , and .

Experience maintaining large-scale web applications and tools with and on .

Advocate and evangelist for emerging technologies such as , related APIs and .

Creative contributor to entire application development cycle; able to communicates ideas rigorously.

Produces clear and accessible documentation for developers, and can communicate proactively with application users. Good instinct for tone in communication.

Good design eye, happiest in close collaboration with user experience designers. Decent working knowledge of .

Also

Passion for good and design.

Once upon a time, built desktop apps on Windows in .

Experience

Senior Software Engineer

  • Twitter , San Francisco
  • (–Present)

Technical lead for Twitter for Websites.

  • Responsible for implementation of Tweet Buttons, embeddable Tweets, embeddable timeline widgets.
  • Builds features for twitter.com, and the Twitter API.
  • Contributor to .

Software Applications Development Engineer

Front-end developer at the Yahoo Developer Network.

  • Designing and building developer participation and collaboration tools.
  • Major contributor to analysis, design and specification of a massive, long-term redevelopment project.
  • Author of various internal whitepapers and tools to improve information sharing and collaboration in an international enterprise of 13,000 co-workers.

Software Applications Development Engineer

Engineer on Fire Eagle.

  • Worked on application design, user experience and front end implementation of Friends on Fire; a Facebook application for sharing location.

  • Contributed to product ideation and brainstorming for future Brickhouse projects.

  • Wrote widely praised ‘ OAuth Best Practices’ documentation for using OAuth with Fire Eagle.

Specification Editor & Author, Community Admin

An active contributor to the successful community driven, structured-data organisation, microformats.org.

  • Specification editor for multiple microformats patterns.
  • Credited author of the recipe microformat.
  • Promoted to community admin by peers in 2007.
  • Lead on the embedded media microformat work.
  • Lead on the microformats test suite effort.
  • Produced the late-2008 redesign of the Microformats.org MediaWiki platform.

A summary of current active work is part of my microformats.org user page.

Web Developer

Front-end web developer, worked on a complete rebuild of Kelkoo, worked with JavaScript unit testing and was responsible for the largest hListing microformat deployment in the world.

Web Application Developer

  • Yobject. Birmingham, UK
  • (–)

Lead developer at ‘yobject’ start-up, building a large e-commerce application for mobile software distribution in ASP.NET

Responsible for database design, system architecture, visual work and front-end implementation.

Education

Computation with Industrial Experience BSc

Awarded Upper Second-Class Honours

Includes a final year software developer project (designed and engineered a personal document management application); awarded First Class grade.

Also includes 14-month software development internship; awarded First Class grade.

4 A-Levels

Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge (-)

Computing, Mathematics, Government & Politics. Modern History (AS level).

10 GCSEs

Sawston Village College, Cambridgeshire

Affiliates

Interests

I cook, take photographs and periodically take up sketching. I play the guitar and indulge in live music. I write about technology and blog at benward.me, and about food at munchmun.ch.

Regular attendee at web technology conferences. Presenter at Barcamps, Social Web Foocamp 2009, WebCamp 2008, BlogTalk 2008 and BBC Mashed.