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 The Brontë sisters adopted male names as they felt they would either not be published at all, or not taken seriously as women authors.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. Others do so to segregate different types of work. For example, Lewis Carroll used his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, to write academic papers on logic. Finally, some writers are so prolific that they are forced to take pen names in order to sell their books to different publishers. For instance, John Dickson Carr, in the 1930s, published two detective stories a year under his own name and another two, through another publisher, under the pen name Carter Dickson. At least that’s what Wikipedia has to say about it…
But alas, pen names are not always secret for Ben Griswold is Johnny Coder.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m Ben Griswold and I live in San Diego, CA with my wife and 2 boys. I have over twelve years of large-scale software development experience working with financial, real-estate, insurance, clinical research, educational, medical and marketing companies. As a principal consultant at Fairway Technologies in La Jolla, CA, I provide technical leadership as architect and developer to a number of west coast firms and my primarily focus is web development using the Microsoft stack. I’m a public speaker, author of this blog, an open source contributor, facilitator of a couple of developer code clubs and I write the Herding Code Podcast’s show notes each week.
Feel free to send me feedback or questions. I can be found at bgriswold at johnnycoder.com.