About Me

Hello! I’m Ben, a Boston-based freelance web designer.

I’ve been coding websites for over 15 years. I grew up in a small town in northern Massachusetts and gained my first exposure to building websites in high school, where I took elective classes in HTML and CSS. Upon graduation I moved to Burlington, Vermont and attended Champlain College, where I attained a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Networking & Information Security.

I began my professional career in 2015 as a hardware technician at a small computer store in Burlington. This job gave me experience at troubleshooting all kinds of hardware and software issues, as well as valuable experience communicating with hundreds of customers per day in a retail environment.

In 2017, I decided I had had enough of small town Vermont and wanted a taste of city life, as well as greater career opportunities, so I moved to Boston and started a new job as an IT support rep at a software company. This job was a big step up for me income-wise, but over time the technical issues I was resolving became pretty monotonous. After a couple of years I began to question whether I wanted to remain in IT long-term, and set my sights on moving to a Software Engineer position.

in 2020, with the onset of the COVID pandemic, the company shifted to a remote model. With the new flexibility combined with the stay-at-home orders, I learned several new coding languages. I also completed a 9-month software development mentorship program at the company I was working at.

In 2021, I achieved my goal of landing the software engineering job. I was living the dream of working remotely, setting my own hours, working on interesting and challenging problems, and learning a lot.

Until…

In 2023, the company I was working at was acquired by a private equity firm. As part of a merger and major restructuring, I was laid off, along with about a third of the company. I found myself among a sea of out-of-work experienced software engineers, with a rapidly shrinking job market as a result of rising interest rates. After applying to hundreds of jobs with no success, I was in a difficult position. How could I keep the freedom and flexibility I had earned, while

Instead of taking a step back in my career, I decided to try to take a big leap forward and use the knowledge I had gained to start a freelance business for myself.

In addition to tech, I also enjoy making music. You can listen to my work on my SoundCloud page.

Thanks for checking out my website, and I look forward to working with you!