A pen name or nom de plume is a pseudonym adopted by an author. Different authors take their pen names for different reasons. The Brontë sisters adopted male names as they felt they would either not be published at all, or not taken seriously as women authors. Others do so for fear of violence or harassment, for example Ibn Warraq. Others do so to segregate different types of work: Lewis Carroll, used his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, to write academic papers on logic; Agatha Christie wrote romantic novels as Mary Westmacott. Some writers, particularly in genre fiction, are so prolific that they are forced to take pen names in order to sell their books to different publishers: this is the case, for instance, with John Dickson Carr, who, in the 1930s, was publishing two detective stories a year under his own name and another two, through another publisher, under the pen name Carter Dickson.

But pseudonyms are not always secret: Ben Griswold is Johnny Coder.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m Ben Griswold. I live in San Diego, CA with my wife and son (and another son on the way very soon.) I have over ten years of professional software development experience architecting and developing web and desktop applications along with Windows services for financial, real estate, educational, medical and marketing companies.

Recently, I made a shift from development manager to full-time developer. Though I enjoyed management and providing technical leadership, I missed building applications with my own hands rather than through the blood, sweat and tears of others. Simply put, I missed coding.

Now, I’m working at a shop in La Jolla, CA. Current projects are focused almost exclusely on the Microsoft stack — .NET 3.5, C#, SQL Server, AJAX, WPF and Silverlight. On my spare time, I muck around with various tools and languages and read a lot of books and blogs and listen to numerous podcasts.

Feel free to send me feedback or questions at bgriswold@johnnycoder.com.