Ben Seymour

Notes from the workbench

Curated.

A few shelves from the archive, arranged by hand.
Pick a shelf and start anywhere.

Technical

Building for the web: images, performance, Laravel, and the small tools I keep making.

25 articles · See them as a list

How I'm building applications these days

Over a decade after an inspiring conference talk, an idea became an initial site in a day. What building looks like for me now: the method, the desk, the Laravel kit, the Cloud habits, and what still bites.

16 min read

Following the sun with Laravel

How my solar experiment collects readings, saves them in Valkey and shares updates through Laravel Cloud, Reverb and React.

4 min read

Every story at its own pace

Highly performant content consumption and rendering with Laravel, across sophisticated CMS-driven workloads.

6 min read

Building a second brain with Claude and Obsidian

I've been building software for decades, but my second brain was always a whiteboard. In early 2026 I decided to build a proper one - local, Markdown-based, Claude-assisted, and completely mine. This is what happened.

10 min read

A Raspberry Pi an OpenClaw and a packet of peanuts

I built an open-source AI agent that runs on a Raspberry Pi, takes commands via WhatsApp, and gets better at its job over time. It started with a knock-knock joke. By Wednesday morning it was ordering peanuts from Amazon.

11 min read

Releasing Uptimer – a self-hosted uptime monitoring tool

I built Uptimer over a weekend using Next.js, Neon PostgreSQL, Vercel, and Resend. It monitors websites and APIs, tracks SSL certificates, sends email alerts, and provides clean dashboards - all within free-tier limits. Today I'm releasing it as an open-source template.

3 min read

Building a Travel Map with Next.js, Leaflet, and Vercel Blob

How I built an interactive travel map for my personal site using Leaflet, Vercel Blob for image storage, and an admin interface for managing travel data. A deep dive into the technical challenges, production deployment issues, and the solutions that made it work.

9 min read

Building an AI Chatbot with Vercel AI SDK and AI Gateway

How I built a professional AI chatbot for my personal site using Vercel's AI infrastructure, Next.js, and a custom floating interface. A deep dive into the technical implementation, RAG considerations, and the benefits of Vercel's AI ecosystem.

8 min read

Optimising for AI SEO with Next.js and Vercel

A comprehensive approach to making your website AI-friendly using Next.js App Router, Vercel's edge infrastructure, and modern web standards. How I transformed my site for better AI discoverability and search rankings.

7 min read

Web Performance Optimisation: hour 3

Following on from the 1st, and 2nd hours spent, on improving the performance of one of my websites… the obsession continues…

5 min read

Web Performance Optimisation: hour 2

After Saturday’s rather fruitful hour, I set myself the follow up challenge to see how much more could I improve the Web Performance given a second hour.

4 min read