Dented Reality

Beau Lebens, IRL

I’m an Australian “web guy” who moved to the US in search of the big technology industry that is Silicon Valley. After 7 years in San Francisco, I’m now in Brooklyn, New York.

I’ve worked in the web industry since ’96, I guess that makes me a veteran or something — or just makes me sound old . Here’s a picture (right) so that you have a face to put to the name. It’s powered using Gravatar so it should stay relatively up to date. If you see me at a convention or meetup or something come and say hi, or tell me I’m a geek and I shouldn’t put my picture on the Intarwebs.

When I’m not sitting in front of a computer screen (2 actually), I’m an active student of Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense system. I currently hold a Blue belt (Level 5), although haven’t been training too much lately. As a relatively recent transplant to the East Coast, I’m still finding my way around and exploring the greater New York area.

Currently I work full-time for Automattic, the company behind WordPress and a few other interesting tools and services such as IntenseDebate, Akismet, bbPress and BuddyPress. If you’re interested in finding out a bit more about me you can check out my résumé (or just get in touch).

If you’re looking for a more formal bio, try this on for size:

Beau is a web developer who hails from Australia, but lives in New York. He’s been working on the web since about 1996 and developing PHP/MySQL systems since 2000. He has been involved in a variety of technical enterprises ranging from an exclusively online division at a University to a niche Search Engine Marketing firm, with a short stint building an online scrapbooking network for parents. Interested in all things social, tech and web-related, Beau holds a degree in online community, culture and governance, and spends most of his time these days hacking WordPress and related web apps for Automattic.

Public Speaking

Now that I work at Automattic, I’m lucky enough to speak at WordCamps once in a while. I’ll try to keep this list up to date with my appearances:

2011-05-14 WordCamp Orange County: Jetpack-powered Plugin Development (Advanced plugin development techniques)
2010-05-01 WordCamp San Francisco: Gravatar Open Profiles (Lighting Talk, 7 mins)
2010-01-30 WordCamp Indonesia: What’s Up With WordPress (Keynote)
2009-11-14 WordCamp New York City: Advanced WordPress Development Environments (and Intro to IntenseDebate)
2009-09-19 WordCamp Philippines: Meet the Family (Extended Version)
2009-09-12 WordCamp Los Angeles: Meet the Family

Beau Lebens online

Although I don’t heavily use a lot of these anymore, you’ll find profiles or bits and pieces of my digital identity at the following sites (once DiSo gains traction I can shift it all back here… right?). Combined, they capture a lot of my digital footsteps (or just provide an account where I want to be able to comment etc).

Dented Reality, the company/website

I registered the business name Dented Reality in Australia in 1998 and consulted under that title for a while (side-work, while also working full-time). I registered the dentedreality.com.au domain for the first time in ’98 as well. Unfortunately dentedreality.com was registered by someone else immediately thereafter, and has been re-registered continuously since then (I’d love to get it!).

This site is powered by WordPress, which is an amazingly flexible piece of software. I make use of my own custom theme based off the semantically-sexy Sandbox Theme, and a collection of plugins, listed below. I hand-craft my CSS and JavaScript (jQuery) using the TextMate editor on a MacBook Pro. The site runs on DreamHost.