Hey, I'm Ben Howdle.

Anya Hargil

"Ben is a fantastic engineer, CTO, and manager. I had the privilege of working as an engineer with Ben for six months and learned an incredible amount. Ben has a keen mind for evaluating and making responsible eng tradeoffs to balance speed with stability and reliability which is invaluable in a startup environment. He also is a very efficient engineer and consistently shipped quality code quickly. During his time at WorkMade, Ben was responsible for spearheading several efforts to make our monitoring and deployment infrastructure more robust while simultaneously writing code to ship new features. As a manager Ben does a great job of mentoring his reports and making time to work with them to answer questions, explain things, and generally improve their skills, but also provide them enough time and space to figure things out on their own. It was a real pleasure to get to work with him and he would be an invaluable member to any eng team."
Chase Croft

"Ben is the ideal tech leader if you're looking to get something off the ground. He takes the time to use the product and truly understand the user's motivation, allowing him to intuitively know where to cut corners for speed and where such shortcuts would come back to haunt us. I was amazed by how effortlessly Ben could shift from tackling a complex infrastructure spike to resolving multiple smaller issues within a matter of hours. Ben joined WorkMade as our CTO during a critical period when we needed to address reliability issues while simultaneously launching new features to gather user feedback. He navigated this delicate balance seamlessly, making progress on both fronts. I've seen too many companies fail because they either move too fast, causing their tech to collapse within a year, or they aim for perfection and take too long to get to market. Ben is the leader who can thread that needle."
Phillip Barthold

"At Mytheresa Ben was paramount in crafting the architectural foundations of a React Native application, while also training and guiding the other engineers. He is a stellar developer, but in my eyes his collaborative and thorough approach make him a real stand-out."
Jon Lay

"We worked with Ben on a tricky React-based medical app, where we needed to cover a lot of ground efficiently, with a small team. Ben was a pleasure to work with - fast, effective and a great communicator, delivering on time and delivering exactly as promised. Particularly valuable was his ability to help us implement best practices, sensible technical architecture and a testing framework that helped ensure that code quality remained high even after his involvement on the project ended and the codebase transitioned to being owned and maintained by another team. Wouldn't hesitate to recommend him to others looking for the same!"
Duane Jackson

"I hired Ben to lead the redevelopment of our SaaS application from crusty old code into something more modern. He made suggestions - along with pro's and con's - that helped us decide which way to go. We ultimately went with his recommendations. I quickly came to depend on Ben's knowledge and expertise on all aspects of the development of our Backbone.js app. His wider experience with other aspects of product architecture, such as REST APIs and CSS was also invaluable. Unlike your stereotypical uber-techie, he's also very personable and everyone enjoyed working with him. I've come to regard him as the foremost expert in his field"
Svilen Gospodinov

"Organising and running ng-workshop with Ben was a great experience. He is an excellent teacher and more than willing to share his knowledge building and scaling web applications. He covered everything from basic JavaScript concepts to high-level architecture and best practices, and made sure everyone is at the same level by the end of the day. We received very positive feedback from all attendees after the event. I don't think the workshop would have been such a success without Ben."
Jamie Edwards

"Ben was able to apply his front-end development and architecture experience from day one, helping us come up with and validate key architecture choices and avoid costly mistakes as we scale Kayako to be used by 10,000s organisations worldwide to support millions of end users. We found Ben's advice to be realistic and pragmatic, factoring in resource constraints, business needs of the day and balancing those with future scalability benefits. We are relieved to have had Ben part of our design process - his early contributions have saved a potentially limitless amount of developer time, pain and costs down the line."
Tom Alterman

"Ben built us responsive front-end framework that minimised maintenance and increased developer efficiency. He was able to quickly understand our needs and provide us with the building blocks we needed to scale our front-end."
Pui-Ling Lau

"Ben's Javascript for Beginners workshop was extremely useful. He covered the fundamentals of Javascript in one day and I've come out of it with the knowledge and confidence to write pure Javascript when I code. The workshop was in a small group, so it was easy to chat, and he is very approachable which meant I wasn't afraid to ask questions. The topics were interactive and dynamic and definitely grows your appetite to code and learn more. I'd recommend this workshop for anyone stuck in learning JavaScript."