About

I’m Ben Crowder. I’ve been posting to this site in one form or another since 2001. I chronically overuse parentheses. Making stuff sparks joy for me. In recent years I’ve mostly been making minimalist symbolic religious art, with occasional forays into typesetting and writing. I love reading. A lot. (So, so much.) 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. And I love making new friends, so don’t hesitate to say hi.

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.) 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:

• 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

Note on AI

I use Real-ESRGAN to upscale my art, but I don’t use LLMs or other generative AI in my work and don’t have any interest in doing so. (If I ever do, I’ll make sure to explicitly indicate it.)

Colophon

Backend: This site is built via Cast, a Node-based static site generator I wrote. (It was originally going to be in Go but I changed my mind.)

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.