Hi! I’m Ben Hofferber.

I’m a technical consultant specializing in web development and I’ve been working in the software industry since 2013. I help to guide and direct teams to leverage technology, methodologies, and anything else that helps to deliver great customer experiences.

That being said… I also really enjoy building. I like making things that entertain, inform, or that are just cool to mess with. My best learning often comes from building and using new tools that look interesting.

Some of my favorite books grant good perspectives on where my thinking comes from (these change semi-frequently):

• The Goal
• The Culture Map
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• Great by Choice

Origins

I was fortunate to be born into a family of communicators. My mother has a Masters of Fine Arts in acting and she taught me about presentation quality, work ethic, and delivering a message. My father is a writer, editor, columnist, and entrepreneur. He fostered my love of computers, developed my writing abilities, and gave me an entrepreneurial spirit. This diverse background in my home helped me explore music, art, math, science, history, and philosophy. It gave me perspective on what I enjoy and a diverse foundation to build upon.

I felt pulled toward game development originally and graduated with a Computer Science degree from the University of Idaho. During and after college I worked for Clearwater Analytics, a financial reporting company based in Idaho. (Notably not a game company.) While school taught me the theory of computers, Clearwater helped me apply it.

As new college graduate I started a social media company with my roommate. We spent 18 incredibly difficult months learning, designing, developing, testing, marketing, and debugging a hybrid, mobile application. Although we didn’t know how to build a business model for it, I learned how to deploy an application into production and what it takes to lead a team toward that goal when you have to keep things scrappy.

Wanting to branch out and explore the world as an international consultant (or, ya know, someone high paid that travels) I left Clearwater to move to work in Toronto, Canada at Rangle.io. I wrote a blog post about my experience. I spent 6 years there and focused primarily on building my leadership and advising capability.

Since then I’ve continued on to work as an AI consultant and launched a consulting firm called Hint Services. I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with great clients, mentors and colleagues who have helped me to gain perspective on technology and the opportunities around us.

Currently I’m on a mission to help The LNK to create an incredible logistics platform for e-commerce clients to ship globally. I’ve joined their team as the Head of Engineering.

I even finally got around to making that game!

On the title

The title, A Clean Slate, highlights my tendency to clear the mental table and reset before trying to tackle any meaningful challenge. Every piece of writing I make builds on what I know but I present information in a way that any post will stand on its own. References will link back but only the latest is on mind.