Ben Deavin
Senior Software Engineering Manager · Occasional Photographer
Senior Software Engineering Manager · Occasional Photographer
I live in Woking with my wife and two young daughters, who keep life delightfully chaotic. At work, I focus on building great user-facing products, leading the frontend community, and helping engineers and managers do their best work. I care a lot about fast and painless experiences — and about building a culture that's supportive, collaborative, and dare I say, even a bit fun.
Since 2017, I've been at Secret Escapes, leading cross-functional teams and supporting both product and engineering growth. Before that, I worked at PA Consulting, where I tackled projects for clients across industries — including a year as a wearable tech specialist, back when everyone thought Google Glass was about to change the world. I also spent time at the startup Smarta, and did my placement year at Goldman Sachs. I studied Computer Science at the University of Bath, graduating with a First — back when jQuery was considered cutting edge.
Outside work, I'm a keen black-and-white photographer (colour blindness makes that less of an artistic choice and more of a necessity), a drummer with a love for anything with a good groove, and a fan of over-engineered side projects (like building my own baby monitor). I also appreciate a good cup of tea, a bad pun, and am a sucker for a gadget.
Despite having years of experience in web development, I had ChatGPT generate this site. It's a little experiment in delegation, automation—and perhaps a test of whether AI can style things better than I ever could on a Friday afternoon.
Well, that was an experience. Like pair programming with a puppy very excited and eager to please, but very easily distracted and not always actually doing what it said it was going to do. ChatGPT was admittedly not the right AI tool for this job as it seemed to want to rewrite the entire thing every time I prompted and it'd just change other random things along it's way. Often just loosing entire sections, or adding in random dead links to the nav. We went on a few side quests with a dark/light mode slider, but it just looked ugly and it kept putting the labels the wrong way round until I gave up. At one point we had an animated lava-lamp style blob background but it just looked weird … but honestly this ones on me, I don't know what I expected to happen with that prompt. I think the icing on the cake for this experiment is it's passing comment about doing better that I'd do on a Friday evening … for the record, it's Thursday today, but ChatGPT keeps thinking it's Friday, and I don't want to be the one to break the bad news.
After some initial disappointment with ChatGPT I thought I'd try a 'proper' coding assistant, and went with Cursor. I have to say the experience was significantly better. I believe the visual design is better, it managed to implement a light/dark mode toggle well. I then tried to get it to animate between the two which did result in a few issues it was unable to fix and I had to go in and manually debug/tweak, but it was quite happy working across multiple files which I have found on other project GitHub Copilot struggles with. For now I am pretty impressed with Cursor, and it can do a lot of the grunt work of coding for you, however I have confidence that my coding skills aren't obsolete yet!
Here's a random selection of some of my favourite photos from over the years.