Ben Butterworth

About

Professional

I'm constantly learning. I invest in myself, developer tooling and the products that I work on. Simplicity / encapsulating complexity, developer experience and user experience are important.

Technologies I have used (recent first):

I actually started off as a designer, not an engineer or programmer. Some of my ideas/contributions can be found in luxury hotel rooms around the world (but also not so luxurious hotels), and in the back of camping vehicles in Australia 😅.

Flutter, iOS and Android: Though I've used Flutter on-and-off since 2020, I've been building a Flutter package plugin, ably_flutter containing a lot of Android and iOS code. It was nice to learn some Objective-C, but I've already begun the migration to Swift 😂. Recently, I've added push notification support, allowing users to register the device for push notifications, and handle everything on the Dart side without writing native code: handling foreground messages, background messages and notification taps / app launches. This was more complicated than expected, since I had to launch a Flutter Engine when the message arrives on Android.
Three.js, NextJS/React, WebSockets/Ably, MediaPipe, TailwindCSS: I learnt these while making Club2d, an anonymous video calling app.
iOS (Swift) and Android: Android and iOS development are both enjoyable in their own ways. I've also built a macOS CLI tool for colleagues, some prototype apps using CoreML (iOS) and Tensorflow Lite (Android). I've been compiling a list of differences which I'll publish soon. Currently working on an iOS library for Ably. I've also touched a small bit Objective-C, though I highly recommend you stick to Swift if possible.
🤯😻 Flutter & Tensorflow since April 2020: In Flutter, I've accumulated 100+ hours now, and I'm loving the type system. I've also been working on my user interface designs, from sketching, wireframing and mocking. On top of normal UI design, I am currently designing a novel user experience as part of my Master's individual project, for physiotherapy patients and computer vision. I have now made a few smaller apps in Flutter. For my final project at Imperial, I am researching 3D pose estimation and computer vision and baking it into an app with Flutter. In 2021, I became a TensorFlow certified developer.
😲 Gatsby, React, HTML and CSS: We needed a landing page for Foodprint, so I quickly learnt these tools to make Foodprint. ~~I'll be using Next.JS instead of Gatsby if I ever need another landing page.~~ Although Gatsby was frustrating, it provides a lot of web performance and tools out of the box.
React Native 🤗/Typescript 😎 in late 2019: I picked up React Native over Christmas 2019, and am now productive in Typescript & React Native, check out Foodprint.
🏃‍♂️🤠 Rust: Alongside C++, I read the rust book, but didn't manage to build any complicated programs. So much for getting stuck in! I've decided to build more user facing programs, but won't hesitate to use Rust if I need performance.
💪 C++ for 3 months in late 2019:
- Imperial'S C++ intensive course (where I learnt real programming skills, thanks to Will Knottenbelt and Fidelis Perkonigg). I got 85% in the exam 😥 and 84% in courseworks on average.
- This course taught me to be pragmatic, and to read the documentation 😍. It taught me to do things without watching courses and videos, and just get stuck in. I recommend the same.
🥰 Javascript throughout 2019: learning javascript basics and writing scripts in my free time
😡 Java for 7 months in early 2019: As part of on-boarding at Ocado & day to day programming. I didn't enjoy Java. Maybe it was because of the enterprise programming & boilerplate.
😃 Python & Javascript & NodeJS for 6 months in late 2018: Self-taught to make web apps. Finally, I was actually programming. In reality I was just following tutorials and could not make anything myself... So much for deliberate practice.
My first real tool I learnt was Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, mostly to draw illustrations and posters. I started when I was 11.
🙂 Python for about 6 months.
- in 2017: Self-taught to do data analysis for simulation results
- in 2018: Self-taught for final year project data analysis for simulation results
Matlab for about 3 months 😭 in 2014, 2015, 2016...
- ...in undergraduate Matlab courses, and several simulation projects. I really did not enjoy Matlab, and know many students who were scared away from programming because of it. Do yourself a favour, don't touch that thing. Use the right tool for the job: in Science, that's Python now, not Matlab.

Devops related platforms I have used (recent first):

Firebase & GCP - Mobile app backend as a service (authentication, database, cloud functions), including Firebase security rules and application threat modeling.
Doc Cloud: The Imperial College Department of Computing Cloud. It's got limitations no amount of money can circumvent. Might be a good thing for my wallet.
Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages - hosting my blog and other small web app projects
Terraform - Deployed AWS & Cloudflare resources for a project. And very soon killed the project with tf destroy 🤣. At least I can redeploy it with tf deploy.
Cloudflare DNS - They update their DNS records almost immediately when you make a change. So TTL does not matter, mostly 😇.
AWS EC2, Lambdas - I used to use Lambdas for email forwarding. I also used EC2 it to some extent when working at Ocado. I've also explored Openfaas and Knative, but I don't want to pay for Kubernetes cluster.
Heroku - The tool that shows up a lot in front of beginners. ~~I soon outgrew this.~~ I just realised there are some really good websites hosted on heroku.

Personal

I am vegan 🥕, love animals, nature and the outdoors. Contact me if you have similar interests or are solving solve interesting and impactful problems, I'd love to help.

Contact

let myEmail = "ben" + "@orth.uk"