Hello, World!
Sufficiently stereotypical post title for a tech blog? Okay, good.
The Man
Hello! I’m Ben High (yes that’s my name), a full-stack software engineer originally from the Midwest, now living in sunny Seattle, Washington. I’m huge into both urban exploration and the occasional camping trip, enjoy doing a little bit of light reading, and love to cook and participate in pretentious tea and coffee brewing snobbery from time to time.
And of course, I’m big into technology. I was always drawn in by computers growing up, loving spending time “working” (I vehemently rejected the term “playing” in the context of computers) in Microsoft Word and Paint on my family’s Compaq Windows 98 computer. In 2007, my family finally caved and bought me my own Toshiba laptop, running good old Windows Vista. Everything just went downhill from there, I assure you.
I got into programming originally in 2011, starting with the local help file tutorial included with a copy of Python 2.7 that I had installed to try fixing an error in Blender (I was also big into 3D animation at the time). After some fooling around with Python, I tried my hand at C++, dabbled in quite a bit of Linux, and eventually started tinkering with Java somewhere along the line. In 2016, I enrolled at Drury University to study computer science. I was doomed from the start, you could say.
I’ve been in the software industry since my senior year in 2019 when I started as an intern at O’Reilly Auto Parts in Springfield Missouri, working on internal web tools. After college, I worked for 3 years at Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas on the Fintech side of things, where I worked with their financial pipelines. In 2023, I said farewell to Walmart and joined the team at Ticketmaster, where I now work on the user-facing side of things, working with both React and Spring (and occasionally Go, where I can sneak it in).
Historically, frontend development has been my specialty. I started with JQuery way back in the day, then picked up React during my time at Walmart. Lately, I’ve been enjoying throwing TypeScript into the mix, and experimenting a bit with Vue in my free time. On the backend side of things, I’ve worked across many languages and frameworks; Spring being the most prevalent, of course, but I’ve worked with Go Fiber, Fastapi in Python, even the tiniest bit of Ruby on Rails. Outside of web dev, I’ve got some experience working C on desktop applications, a bit of Dart with mobile development on Flutter, and a smattering of database and message queue knowledge.
But let’s be honest here, you’re not here to hear me blab about my work experience. You want to hear about-
The Miss
I’m joined here in the Emerald City by my fabulous, felonious feline flatmate, Miss Marshmallow Von Lattefur III. She is a Siamese (or perhaps Balinese, I’m not really sure) mix whom I adopted from the Seattle Animal Shelter in June of 2025. I originally was planning to foster her, but we ended up really getting along well, so I made her part of the family. She’s about a year old (although we’re not entirely certain her exact age), and loves to get in her post-breakfast snuggles, dive head-first into cardboard boxes, and commit federal tax crimes. You’ll see a lot of her here, I promise.
The Legends
Now, I’m sure you’re [probably not] wondering: why open a blog in 2025? Who blogs in 2025? Well, I’m not really one for social media (stuff rots your brain, I swear), but I wanted to create a space to dump my thoughts on technology, programming, cooking, books, Marshmallow- whatever happens to cross my brain at any given moment.
I used to run a blog back in 2011 with a friend of mine, where we posted all about the latest tech, so blogging is a little bit nostalgic for me in a way. And sometimes I’m working on a project that I want to tell a tiny corner of the world about. That’s what this site is for.
I likely won’t post super often here, but I’ll try to jump in with this or that technical observation, or little side project, or cat picture, or whatever vaguely interesting thing I come across. Stay tuned if you like that kind of thing!
Filed under: Meta - @ August 20, 2025 11:50 pm