About

My now page has an overview of what I’m working on these days.

I’m happily married with wonderful kids and a lot of books. I’m also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

My interests include reading (particularly history, social justice, science, tech, publishing, and sf&f), typesetting/bookmaking, design, writing, art, coding, languages (particularly dead ones), genealogy, and geography/cartography.

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.

Contact info

Feel free to email me (ben.crowder@gmail.com) if you have questions or feedback.

I also hold open office hours for those who want to talk via video or audio.

Social media

I’m technically on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but I try to avoid them other than for posting new releases.

AI

Nothing on this site was made using generative AI (LLMs, etc.). If I ever do use AI on a project (which seems pretty unlikely at this point), I’ll make sure to explicitly indicate it.

Colophon

Backend: This site runs on an old custom CMS I wrote eons ago and a blog engine running on Django.

Frontend: The design is all custom. The HTML is generated server-side, with just a few lines of JavaScript. The typeface is Literata.

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.