Ben Hanzl.

Hello World

TLDR: I'm Ben Hanzl, a Senior Engineering Manager at Honeycomb.io with extensive experience building and growing engineering teams. I plan to use this website to share his random thoughts and learnings.

Who is Ben Hanzl?

👋 Hello. I'm Ben Hanzl, a Senior Engineering Manager at Honeycomb.io. I lead the team that owns many of the things users interact with to understand their software systems, such as Boards and Service Maps.

I started my software career at an early age, building simple games with my dad on an Atari computer (not the video game console). I then moved on to a computer manufactured by AT&T, where I was introduced to MS-DOS. Over the subsequent years, I was exposed to the Internet, which ignited my insatiable thirst for knowledge and learning more about the ever-evolving world of software.

My professional software career started right after graduating with a Software Engineering degree from Florida Tech (formerly the Florida Institute of Technology). I began in the government contracting world, working for several years at Harris Corporation and then Lockheed Martin. I then transitioned into tech startups, where I fell in love with the fast pace and opportunities to impact the organization significantly. My first startup was IZEA, a pioneer in creating influencer marketing, where I spent almost a decade advancing my skills and learning how to build and grow engineering teams. My next step was Trunk Club, where I learned the value of proper product engineering that needed to scale quickly to meet demand. All of this experience has led to my current role at Honeycomb.

In my free time, I enjoy not just traveling the world, but also sharing the fascinating stories and experiences I gather along the way with friends over a pint of beer. I believe in the power of storytelling to connect people and ideas. I also keep up to date with "current" software industry trends, maintain a vegetable garden, and start new hobbies that I don't always keep.

Why Do I Blog?

Let's all be honest about how long we keep domains that are forever "under construction." I have owned benhanzl.com since 2008 (according to WHOIS), and it has never been a thing.

Starting in 2024, I want to change this by using this as a home for random thoughts and learnings. It is primarily a place for me to look back on, but I hope you also find some value (and if you do, please reach out and let me know). It is also a fun project for me to grow my skills in modern frontend technologies, which I often handed off to other members of the teams I worked on so I could deep-dive into the backend and infrastructure.

How to Get in Touch?

In the post-Twitter times, I'm mostly quiet on social media, but I frequently open Mastodon and sometimes Bluesky.