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 The Brontë sisters adopted male names as they felt they would either not be published at all, or not taken seriously as women authors.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 got that out of the way, I’m Ben Griswold. I live in San Diego, CA with my wife and 2 sons. I have roughly a dozen years of professional software development experience architecting and developing web, service and desktop applications for financial, real estate, educational, medical and marketing companies.
I recently made a shift from development manager to full-time developer. Though I enjoyed management, I can’t compete with actually building applications with one’s own hands (rather than through the blood, sweat and tears of others.) Simply put, I missed coding and I jumped ship.
Now I’m working at a shop in La Jolla, CA. Current projects are focused almost exclusively on the Microsoft stack — .NET 3.5, C#, SQL Server, WPF, WCF, jQuery, AJAX and even a little 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. I can be found at bgriswold at johnnycoder.com.