My name is Ben Scheirman. I am an experienced software developer from Houston, TX. I spend most of my time these days writing Swift and Ruby and recording screencasts.

ben-in-barcelona

I’m a regular speaker at developer conferences all over the world. If you want to book me to speak at a conference, please get in touch.

I started out programming when I was about 13, tinkering with QBASIC and creating simple games and screensavers. My favorite experience was creating a fake application called “DELBUG” that “removes bugs from programs.” It proceeded to tell the user that it had no choice but to format their hard drive.

qbasic

After that, I was hooked.

I took Computer Science classes all through high school, then took the passion to college as well. I received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston in 2004.

From 2004-2010 I was an avid .NET developer, becoming an ASP Insider in 2008 and eventually a Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET in 2008 and 2009. I wrote two books on ASP.NET MVC, which was an interesting process.

In 2009 I started becoming interested in iPhone development, so I picked up a few books, watched some online videos, and eventually wrote my first app, Pocket Tabs. It became pretty popular, rising to #8 in the music category for one week. However, due to legal pressure, I decided to take it off of the store due to the unfortunate copyright laws around guitar tablature. In 2010, I released my 2nd app, Giggle Touch. I enjoyed the process of writing iPhone apps, and my part time interest with Ruby on Rails allowed me to make a career shift to doing that full time. So in 2010 I left a nice job as a .NET consultant to explore the crazy fun world working at a small company on technologies I love.

In 2012 I started NSScreencast, producing weekly screencasts on iOS development. It was well received and became quite popular in the iOS developer community.

I also do iOS and Rails consulting under my company, Fickle Bits.

I live in Houston with my wife and five awesome children. When I’m not working, I’m usually hanging out with my family, programming for fun, or playing guitar.

Website header graphic by Eike Klingspohn.