After 4 awesome years of working with 350.org, it is time for a new chapter.

Saying this feels a little surreal. When I joined 350.org , I was tasked with leading a nascent engineering team - setting up engineering systems, culture, and clearing a huge backlog of technical debt. I wanted to build systems that were modern, secure, and sustainable. What I didn't expect was how much this place would shape me as an engineer, as a leader, and as a human being. Four years later, I leave with a deeper understanding of how technology can serve a global mission and drive real change.

During my time here, I had the privilege of working with teams across continents, guiding architecture changes, improving our cloud footprint, shaping engineering culture, and solving some really tricky problems. Looking back, I'm really proud of what we built together. We modernized an entire global digital ecosystem spanning hundreds of WordPress sites, multiple campaigns, mapping tools, analytics infrastructure, and internal platforms. We shortened the lead time for idea to deployment, consolidated hosting into a unified GCP environment, brought real DevOps discipline to deployments, and introduced Infrastructure as Code, containerization, CI pipelines, Business Intelligence Analytics, and data warehousing that actually scaled. We improved security, observability, and reliability across systems used by teams in many timezones. It pushed me. It sharpened me. It humbled me. And it made me better.

One of the things I'm especially proud of is how we embraced the open source ethos. I've always believed that open source is not just a tooling choice but a philosophy. It is transparency, collaboration, and freedom from vendor lock-in. And at 350, that belief translated into real impact. We introduced self-hosted platforms like Coolify, consolidated internal tooling using open source stacks, reduced dependency on proprietary services, and cut operational costs without compromising quality. Open source allowed us to spend more energy on mission-critical work, not licenses.

We also built some very nifty pieces of engineering:

• We rebuilt our multisite WordPress architecture powering five networks and over 500 sites to allow for automated deployments and plugins/themes upgrades that survived the Automattic vs WPEngine drama — when websites around the world could not get updates.
• A URL shortener API with rich analytics that could be plugged into any of our systems.
• A modern design system documented with Storybook.
• A fully automated web archiving pipeline preserving years of historical climate activism.
• Multiple campaign tools, mapping apps, and internal services that made the work of organizers easier and more scalable. Our work powered two major Global Campaign moments in the last years.

These things weren't just "projects." They were thoughtful engineering decisions that made the ecosystem more resilient, transparent, and maintainable. They also represented a belief that nonprofit tech can be world-class.

I am especially grateful for the people. The trust, the collaboration, the feedback, the late-night Slack questions, the laughs, the difficult decisions, and the shared victories. You all made this journey a gift. Working alongside you has been one of the highlights of my career. As I step into a new phase, I carry the lessons, the friendships, and the sense of purpose that 350.org helped shape. I'm excited for what comes next, and even more excited for the chance to keep building, automating, learning, and creating impact wherever I go.

Now it's time for a pause. Over the next few weeks until the end of the year, I'll be stepping back to spend time with family, breathe a little, and reflect in writing on the last four years -- you should definitely keep an eye on my blog in the coming weeks. I want to document the architecture choices, the engineering philosophy, and some of the subtle but meaningful design patterns that shaped our systems. I think it will help me close this chapter well and start the next one with clarity.

I'm also open to both consulting and full-time opportunities. If you're building something meaningful, technically interesting, or deeply impactful, feel free to reach out. And at the start of the new year, I'll be contributing more actively to the open source projects I care about, so I'd love recommendations for orgs or repos doing great work.

Onward to the next chapter, with gratitude in my heart and a renewed sense of purpose.

Welcome to my blog!

This is my first blog post. It is also a story of how I beat procrastination.

I started building websites in 2014. It was nothing fancy. Just a few webpages using Joomla! - an open source content management system that allows you to build websites in a user friendly way - with a WYSIWYG editor and modules. WordPress was still in its blogging infancy back then - a tool for publishing blogs. You couldn't build full websites with them, or maybe you could, but the websites were quirky. I got my first paid gig a few months later to build a website for a pageant. That was how I began my journey as a professional website designer. Before then, I was designing poster graphics in Photoshop and Illustrator.

A few more paid website design gigs along the line, I decided it was time to build my own personal website. Afterall, what is a professional website designer without a website. I discovered SEO and decided it would be a good way to put my brand out there. It was on Thursday, 21st of May 2015 - ISIS had just taken over the Syrian city of Ramadi in Iraq, Osama Bin Laden considered leaving the Pakistani compound where he was staying before the raid by the US Navy seals, and David Letterman was going to announce his retirement from late-night TV after 33 years - that I bought the domain name for my website (stbensonimoh.com).

The plan was simple: leverage my graphic design finesse to create a logo, embed it in my website-to-be, and flaunt my portfolio like a peacock on display. A form for booking gigs would be the icing on the cake. But life had other plans. You know what they say: "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." Haha!

At this point, I had started taking courses in VFX and 3D animations and begun building stuff in Cinema 4D. My video editing and animation skills were improving rapidly. Then a friend who had some experience building websites and who was intrested in VFX Animations struck a deal with me - I'd teach him VFX Animations and he would teach me PHP - VFX lessons for PHP wisdom. I was limited by the Joomla! themes that were avaialable to me and I did not know how to build my own custom themes. So I paused building my website while we continued with the VFX projects. In that time, he introduced me to WordPress as an alternative to Joomla for building websites and I was sold! I decided to build my personal website with WordPress. Spoiler alert: I was smitten by the abundance of free WordPress themes.

I had relocated to a new city - Lagos - earlier that year, with the hopes of finding an animation job at a VFX studio. I had planned to have a career in VFX Animations while my webdesign skills would be used in designing my portfolio website. But work was not forthcoming and I had to survive by taking on webdesign jobs. I did that until early 2016 when I got a job at a new women WebTV that was planning to use VFX heavily for their broadcasting and video-on-demand. You wouldn't imagine that I built their websites. Haha! Work on my personal websites came to a grinding halt as I took on more responsibilities at the TV studio. Sadly, the studio closed shop by 2017 - 2 years later.

By this time, I was actively programming in PHP and MySQL and could edit any WordPress theme or build one from scratch. I started taking website building jobs again and integrated payment engines/systems as well. I would often get asked why I did not have a personal website, so I decided to put up something with WordPress. It was great looking - probably the best WordPress website I have ever built - but I wasn't impressed by it. I even rarely visited the site. Don't misunderstand me. WordPress is a great platform. I just felt like my website was too - basic. I was a programmer and felt like my website should reflect that - more features.

I started learning about Cloud Computing/Networking and could build and configure mail servers in AWS on a virtual machine with postfix, dovecot, MySQL, amavis, clamav, etc. Webservers were a walkover for me. In 2018, I got the Google Developer Scholarship (GADS) and my fullstack skills improved greatly. I started a consulting, building web apps with custom features or integrating custom features in WordPress websites by building plugins.

Then COVID happened. The timeline was blurred afterwards. I volunteered for not-for-profits and did my consulting on the side.

In 2020, I learned about JAM stack and found that I could build my website with React on the frontend, GraphQL for the API, and WordPress as the backend. It felt cool, so I took down my existing WorPress website. I didn't get to build my website immediately as I moved to another city to start over after COVID, while volunteering for not-for-profits as Consultant Chief Technology Officer and doing some freelancing work.

In the summer of 2021, I started working full-time again in tech and did not touch my website. Later, I discovered Gatsby and started building my website with the intention of using WordPress as the CMS. Then I found Markdown and was thrilled! I was going to use Markdown for the blog instead. Work stalled on the website for the whole of 2022. Perhaps because I was busy at my fulltime job, or because of procrastination.

This year, completing my website and launching it was a NEW YEAR RESOLUTION but I didn't get to work on it until last month. In that time, I had built and developed tens of websites to completion for others. With the year winding down, I decided to take action to beat procrastination. This post that you are reading is a proof of that.

Lesson: Get to do things immediately no matter what. I could have just gotten to it. I ended up doing something in 7 years that I could have done in a few weeks.

I hope you enjoyed reading this? There's more to come. ;)