About

I’m Ben Crowder, and this site (or one of its earlier incarnations) has been my home on the web since July 2000. I chronically overuse parentheses and em dashes, and I am not an LLM. I love reading. A lot. So, so much. Making things makes me happy. (Most recently, “things” has meant minimalist symbolic religious art and some fiction.) I’m an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I live in Utah with my wife (only one!) and kids and a house full of books. Feel free to say hi, especially if you want to talk about books.

Work

By day I’m a software engineer at Planet. (This site is, however, unrelated to my work there and does not represent the company in any way.)

I’m a former designer and have leaned toward frontend for most of my career, though I’ve also been a backend engineer. My resume page has more detail about my work experience.

Slash pages

I have a number of slash pages on this site, because it’s fun and I can’t seem to stop adding them:

• Guestbook — leave a comment
• Hello — ways to contact me
• Interests — things that currently interest me
• Now — what I’m working on now
• Reading — a list of books I’ve read
• Subscribe — links to feeds
• Timeline — a timeline of the types of projects I’ve worked on
• Uses — software I use

AI

I really don’t like LLMs (or other generative AI) and avoid using them whenever I can. I use Real-ESRGAN to upscale my art, though that’s a GAN (earlier machine learning algorithm) and using it does not feel incompatible with my views on contemporary generative AI.

Colophon

Backend: This site is built via Cast, a Node-based static site generator I wrote in early 2025.

Frontend: The design is all custom, with the most recent redesign in January 2025. The font is EBC Garamond, my customized variation of EBGaramond08. There’s no site-wide JavaScript.

History: The first incarnation of this site was at blankslate.net back in July 2001. I had some proto-blog posts on the site in those early years but have since taken them (and hundreds of other early posts) down. There were also a number of separate blogs along the way that ended up getting folded in when I consolidated everything into bencrowder.net. I’ve redesigned the site periodically throughout the course of its life and (let’s be realistic) will no doubt continue to do so until I can’t use a computer anymore.