The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

Ben Howdle

benhowdle.im

Two-time startup CTO. Author of The First CTO. Fractional engineering leadership for founders making decisions they can't easily reverse. Engagements from £6,000.

Engineering management / careersJavaScript / TypeScriptAI / ML

’15’20’25
Posts
71 from 5 Jan 2012 to 16 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://benhowdle.im/feed.xml

2026 8

  1. Debugging Against Your Own Prediction Engine
  2. Debugging Against Your Own Prediction Engine ↝
  3. More posts →
  4. Determining Determinism, Non-Deterministically
  5. Contract-Driven Development: Write the Truth Once
  6. Hot Potato: How Projects Actually Get Shipped
  7. Meet Somna
  8. So You're About To Do Your First Conference Talk

2025 15

  1. Amygdala's Determinism, Good Will Hunting & Gut Feel: A Playbook for Developers Building With Intelligence
  2. Building Devdle: Notes from the Neon Arcade
  3. fintech_devcon 2025 Talk: Securing a Banking Platform's API + UI
  4. AI Struggles To Help You Think
  5. The Problem → Solution → Impact Gap
  6. Principles & Implementation: Lessons in Surviving the Transient Nature of Software Engineering
  7. Solving vs. Augmenting: The Developer's Dilemma in a New Codebase
  8. How I Led a High-Performing Engineering Team Without Micromanaging
  9. The Software Engineer Spectrum: Speed vs. Accuracy
  10. Migrating 160,000 Lines of Production Banking JavaScript to TypeScript with Zero Downtime
  11. Getting Real(about)Time
  12. Does it work, how you want it to, most of the time?
  13. Securing a Banking UI & API: Lessons From a Fintech CTO
  14. 10 Ways I Approach Engineering Leadership That Doesn't Leave Me Hating Myself
  15. Entangled Interfaces: A Quantum Leap in UI Engineering with React

2024 1

  1. Understanding Systems: A Journey Through Chaos, Meaning, and Observation

2023 1

  1. Chaos Engineering: Jurassic Park & Distributed Systems

2020 1

  1. The 3-Phase Time-off Schedule for Contractors

2018 2

  1. On Starting
  2. Notes on using Vue and React in production

2017 1

  1. Making Jekyll workflow a bit better

2016 2

  1. Creating a real-time test automation platform for Cisco with React & WebSockets…and React Native
  2. Hello Speculo - easy colour palette visualisation

2015 1

  1. Everything Changes But You

2014 5

  1. Creating a dynamic search page for your Jekyll blog using JavaScript
  2. iOS for Web Developers: Building Permeate
  3. Building a Backendless Web App in 2 Hours
  4. Easy Peasy Equal Heights
  5. News vs. Information Seeking

2013 16

  1. Hosting your Blog or Portfolio on GitHub
  2. Rewriting History with Backbone.js
  3. Options are the devil
  4. Too Scared To Write A Line Of Code
  5. The Principle of Least Power
  6. Make it Personal
  7. Open Source is kinda weird
  8. A Backbone View to a Kill
  9. Jekyll In 15 Minutes
  10. Patterns for Managing Large Scale Backbone Applications
  11. useCapture demystified
  12. The Unseen Revisions
  13. setTimeout - a temporary hack
  14. Apis
  15. On Heisenberg.js
  16. Underlying Passion

2012 12

  1. Mobile Last
  2. Twitter Bootstrap
  3. Smashing Magazine's The Mobile Book
  4. Using jQuery custom events in your Object Literal and Observer Pattern applications
  5. From jQuery to JavaScript and back again
  6. Set up your own GitHub page
  7. The obsession with responsive websites
  8. A quick start JavaScript class structure
  9. Hire Yourself, You Won't Look Back
  10. Say Yes To Everything
  11. Others Are Better Than You, Get Over it
  12. Newcomers to web design, don't be put off

Undated 6

  1. Or see how I work →
  2. 📖 New Playbook The First CTO: The Job Nobody Explains A playbook for the loneliest job in startups. Everything I learned the hard way as a two-time startup CTO - architecture decisions, hiring, managing founders, and surviving yourself. → £12 ebook · £79 Playbook + Toolkit See options →
  3. Closeloop
  4. Everyday Stoic
  5. Shades sold
  6. FlickFeed