Ben Holmen

Photos by Andrea Paulseth, Evelyn Nelson, Luong Huynh, Nick Meyer, and Kip Holmen. Halfmoon Chimes at Eaux Claires 2026 My hometown - Eau Claire, Wisconsin - is home to a singular music, literary, and art festival that is the brainchild of Justin Vernon (

A few weeks ago, I finally shipped my most ambitious project ever, hoping for a solid reception. I'd told friends that I wanted it to go viral, not too viral - viral enough to keep it interesting but not overwhelming. I got that, and more. I knew that I c

TL,DR: I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it If you just want to play with it, goto kilopx.com. The backstory Six years ago I had an idea to build a large, inefficient display with a web interface t

Inspired by my friend Zuzana and her #30in30 experiment, I decided to make a photograph each day for 30 days. I found it very challenging! I'd fight to come up with one good image, post it at the end of the day, and then wake up and have to do it again th

Yet again, Joe provided the spark: I immediately knew I needed to build an app to let internet friends guess your height and find out just how much they were under- or over-estimating how tall you are. Justin Jackson's a great example: he gives off 6'1" e

My buddy Chris Morrell was kind enough to have me on his extremely chill podcast, Over Engineered, to talk about my Pair-amid Scheme. We nerded out over making - Chris has an obsession with sewing pants, and I shared my Kilopixel project. I honestly didn'

On my absurd podcast Cheese & Weather we covered a topic Jason Beggs has been requesting: what do we think of this soup that has been continuously simmering for 45 years? Since that article was written in 2019 it's actually a 50 year old soup! I'll let yo

I was honored to chat with my friend Matt Stauffer on his new podcast, The Business of Laravel. We chatted about building a large wholesale platform on the TALL stack, building a team of happy and productive developers, effectively managing a remote team,

I recorded my first tip video for the good people at Laravel News. Enjoy! There are a LOT of weird time zones in PHP Some favorites in America: eight in Indiana, three in North Dakota, twelve in Argentina, but I'm partial to America/Chicago. They come fro

I typically pair with people on my team but I recently reached out to Joe Tannenbaum when he mentioned that he'd never paired before. We both took a chance on an internet stranger, hopped on a Zoom call, and had a blast pairing together! It turned out to