Following on from the information in the sidebar, Benjie Gillam was brought up in Ringwood, Hampshire, England, UK. He attended Ringwood Infant School, Ringwood Junior School, Ringwood School, and then Ringwood Sixth Form, before going on to attend Southampton University, where he completed his 3 year BSc in Mathematics with Physics.

Benjie is an avid supporter of open source software (OSS), and is frequently seen filing issues, pull requests and helping others on GitHub. In his younger days he developed extensive knowledge of GNU/Linux through constant tinkering at every opportunity - switching to Linux as his primary desktop operating system way back in 1999. He ran Linux on servers, desktops, laptops, PocketPCs and other embedded systems; though sadly he never got around to installing it on his toaster…

Although he switched to Mac as his primary desktop in the early 2010s (primarily because he was developing iPhone apps, but stayed because he recognised how much more productive he was when he wasn’t tempted to tinker with his main operating system all the time), he still plays with Linux on an almost daily basis in VMs, on internet servers and on various Raspberry Pi’s and similar devices around his house, in the makerspace, and of course in Alan the Dalek.

A keen fan of automation in all its forms, Benjie is always looking for opportunities to save himself and others time; channelling this passion into projects such as BOTS.sh (an IDE for building, deploying and debugging web service automations in record time) and Graphile (a plugin-based system and large collection of plugins for building powerful, performant and extensible GraphQL APIs rapidly).

The best ways to reach Benjie are via @Benjie on Twitter, and via traditional email: benjie @ this domain.