My name is Ben Johnson, and I was born in Plano, Texas in 1984. If I had to sum up my life in Texas in one word, it would be "baseball". Most of my time was spent playing baseball in very competitive leagues, but my real passion was always in computers. It's funny because I was forced to put that statement to the test: When it came time to go to college I had 2 choices:
- Attend UT Panam on a baseball scholarship
- Attend Oklahoma State University on an academic scholarship
Obviously I chose the latter, otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here typing on my nerdy blog. That being said, I all of a sudden had a lot more time on my hands and decided to see where I could take this computer thing.
During my first year in college I started my own one man company called 4Shadow to help make a little money. I mainly churned out PHP websites, wrote Java and C applications, performed various server administration, and built a variety intranet software. Word of mouth was good and the projects kept getting bigger and more complex. At the time I had my own PHP framework called Infusion, it was great starting out, but it was not so great for the bigger projects. I learned a lot since I initially built Infusion, so I decided to build infusion v2 to assist me in my larger projects.
Before I started I wanted to make sure I wasn't recreating the wheel. That's when I came across ruby on rails and realized I would be a fool to waste my time on my own framework and not use this. Ruby alone was enough to get me to switch. From there all of my large web based projects were written in ruby on rails / merb. I graduated college and moved to New York to try and grow my company.
I am currently a partner at National Event Company, as well as a partner at Concierge Live. I also do some consulting under my personal company Binary Logic. To see some of my work check out the my work section, or look at my open source projects on github.