Ben Arent is Director of Product at Teleport, based in Oakland, CA. Writing on product, security, infrastructure access, and developer tools, plus conference talk summaries and IoT projects.
For the past decade I’ve been running some form of a home lab. It started as a playground to experiment with various projects, and has provided a learning ground for testing and breaking projects. I’ve often spent more time fixing than building, but that’s part of the fun. Fast forward, 10 years, there are many awesome tutorials and videos from people doing useful things with their homelab. From…
I’ve been at Teleport for a bit now and unlike the previous developer companies I’ve worked at. Teleports Community Edition provides something useful for my home setup. In this post I’ll outline why I converted an old Raspberry Pi to be a home bastion, and how you can do the same. Preview Why setup a home bastion? Firstly, for the uninitiated a Bastion host is a special-purpose computer designed…
2019 is shaping up to be a busy year. After my last post, I had a few meetings and ended out meeting the Gravitational team to see what they’ve been up. I have been following the founders and the growth of Gravitational since they left Rackspace to start Gravitational in 2015. Gravitational helps companies securely deliver applications into any environment. Gravity provides a bubble of consistency…
As always, it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog. I want to say I’ll be doing this more often, but historical precedent says otherwise. I’ve been slowly making updates to the rest of the site. Pruning and cleaning up my portfolio to reflect the SaaS projects I’ve been working on the last 6 years. Due to many factors, I’ve been unable to keep the site up-to-date with public updates, but I’ve…
I was recently asked by my friends at FilePicker to give some advice on how to write an archetypal blog post for new product features. This is a common question I get asked, so I’m going to outline best practices in 2015, and then use these to scope a blog post for FilePicker. Best Practices Blog Posts A blog post is a useful way to communicate a new product and feature release. Using a blog makes…
For the last 2 and a half years, I have been working at TRIL. Last week I handed in my notice to join a small but highly ambitious Dublin based start-up. Leaving TRIL was a difficult decision, it was my first full-time employment out of University, and it has been an amazing opportunity to work with so many talented people. My blog has been very quiet for two years as so much of my work has been…
For the last 24hrs I have been helping a team to build a website for CDS Helping Hands. As part of 24hr the web. . A big thanks to Stuart and Daragh for setting everything up and sorting us out with loads of sponsored food. Big shout-out to Joe Burger, IQContent, Bel & Bellucci and many more. We took this site http://www.cdshelpinghands.ie to this (all in 24hrs!) http://www.handinhand.ie/ My role…
On the weekend of the 7 th to 9 th , I spend two days and an evening in an old renovated wheat storehouse that is the digital hub. The two days were part of the 54hr start up weekend , hosted by the NDRC 1. Come with your machine setup. I forget that I had previously installed Windows 7, and had not reinstalled Adobe Creative suite onto my laptop. Lucky the location at the NDRC the internet…
Conferences. Presented at ERIC . Presented bettie at eComm . Hosted and Organised IxDA Session at iHCI . After hours activity. Organised and ran an Arudino Workshop . Organised DEFUSE: Design for Use. IxDA Dublin event with over 200 people. Winning Team of 24hr Design Challenge . 3rd in UCD Campus Company Development Program . Skills Acquired. A better understanding of grounded theory , and learnt…
Recently my blog has been very quite, mostly because I can’t blog about the TRIL centre and secondly because I have been very busy doing the below. This post will show the growth of the IxDA community as we prepare for our one year anniversary. I moved to Ireland one year ago to start my first graduate job as an interaction designer. I had just graduated a product design degree at Middlesex…