Has it been a while since you've caught up with me? Read on to answer the question "What is Ben doing now?".

Last updated 2023 December from my home in Seattle, WA.

Work

I'm no longer at SunPower and am looking for my next full-time gig. Let me know if you have any recommendations. Bonus points for climate, gaming, open source, devx/vel, or size < 100.

Video Games

I'm as into games as ever. I'm currently playing:

I recently completed:

Climate

Since 2021 I've been passionate about climate change thanks to a permanent reminder from my past self. I now work at a clean energy company (see next), have become more outspoken and cognizant about issues, and am becoming more politically active.

When I get questions from friends and family about what they can do to help, my answer is always the same: become active in local politics. Yes, vote, but also talk to your representative and look up some meetings to attend (virtual or not). Here's why:

  1. Individual action—like spending more money on environmentally conscious products—is not dependable or resilient, and does not affect the majority of emissions.
  2. Complaining about emitters doesn't help. Businesses that sacrifice profit for the public good get outcompeted and usually die. Enacting policy levels the playing field, so the public good and financial success are not mutually exclusive.
  3. Local politics are easy to impact. Look up some meetings and voice an opinion, and you can literally sway a district. Without you, the only attendees might have been retired people who want things to stay the same and business owners (or people they pay) with different incentives than you.
  4. National politics trail local politics.

You don't have to become active in every little thing. Pick one or two issues that are close to you. Personally I'm interested in walkable neighborhoods and improving public transit, so I take a liking to anything that makes building housing easier.

Photography

I've been into amateur photography since 2021, as you can see in the navigation menu above. For my first two years I used an old hobby-grade Canon DSLR my mom had lying around. For 2023, I decided to switch to the Micro Four Thirds system for its open standard and smaller size. I use an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III.

This Website

Somehow after a dozen attempts over two dozen years I finally have a website that I've stuck with for a while, twos.dev. The secret sauce turned out to be building the static generator myself.

I often want to try some new way of writing (e.g. writing in Org during my Emacs kick) and owning the generator is the only way I can be sure those cravings don't lead me to switch entire systems to support it.

For more information see Inside twos.dev, or the documentation for the generator.

I'm Autistic

I found out in 2020 that I'm autistic. It has been a fantastic and eye-opening experience. Every few weeks I learn that some weird behavior I've had is attributable to autism, and that there's a pool of people I can talk to about it.

These vary from having been mute for 9 years as a child, to spending multiple hours a day preparing and retrospecting conversations, to not liking hot weather, to sometimes feeling like every little noise is far too loud.

If you know me and your first reaction to this is that I don't seem autistic, I wrote Anonymously Autistic just for you.

Mastodon

I've mostly jumped ship from Twitter and have switched to Mastodon: @[email protected].

I self-hosted a single-user instance for a year and don't regret it. I know a lot more about the fediverse than when I started. But the benefits started to flatten and the costs were high, so I recently moved to Hachyderm. Their code of ethics and governance model is impressive.

This page is in the form of Derek Sivers's /now page.