Ben speaking at a conference

Ben Dechrai takes deeply technical topics and engagingly slices them into digestible portions. He helps audiences understand the topic, the motivation for the approach to the topic, and - this is the hard part - how to do something quite technical to a professional standard and really understand why it works the way it does.

He brings the "why" first, then the "how", gifts his audience with comprehension from the big picture to the smallest details, and makes the whole thing so fun one doesn't notice the time passing. He preps his tech and his code to a depth that there aren't failures, and the audience always feels their time is valued and respected - bringing value to any conference where he presents.

Ben delivers world class talks. Entertainingly. Make him your next keynote.

— Daniel Spector
Software Engineer

I wrote my first program on an Amstrad CPC 6128 at the age of eight, built my own 286 PC at twelve, and have been coding ever since. I love the magic of typing words and seeing it come to life.

Web Developer

Having commenced a software engineering course at university in 1995, I noticed a distinct lack of web development courses available. Sensing a future in this new technology, I took matters in to my own hands.

Developer Advocacy

I've been creating commuity spaces and sharing my knwoledge with developers since 2003. My career move to developer advocacy was a natural progression of my passion for teaching through doing.

I've been programming computers since the age of about 5, coding basic on a Texas Instruments TI-99. My first 8086-based PC was a 286 with a 40Mb MFM hard drive and 2Mb of RAM! That's right folks. My dad had gone big; most people were still limited to 5Mb disks and were lucky if they have 1Mb of memory. Good times.

Believe it or not, Windows 3.0 would actually run on such a beast, and before long I was hacking the win.ini,system.ini, and progman.ini files to create a multi-user environment, controlled by a series of batch scripts. Every time one of my parents closed Windows (yes, Windows ran under DOS, so there was an exit option), the aforementioned ini files would be reverted to a known good state, so I no longer had to provide desktop support to a generation that didn't notice they'd deleted the shortcut to Word from the desktop. Again.

Not happy with the prospect that the aforementioned generation might possibly see fit to try and break out of theautoexec.bat boot script, I dabbled in assembly using debug.exe to manifest my most useful creation: a binary executable that would disable CTRL-C and CTRL-BREAK. Finally, I could stop my parents from becoming leet haxxors. Or script kiddies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The final piece of the puzzle fostered mostly fond memories of Turbo Pascal, which I used to create an authenticated menuing system, allowing each family member to have access to the systems they needed.

Historians believe this period of my life was the inflection point that created the privacy loving security monster in me.

The early days of the internet were exciting, and even though the first web browser was 6 years old already, there wasn't a lot of formal training for web technologies. Always one to learn by doing, I took matters in to my own hands and started a web development and hosting company, Reality42, with my high-school friend. Kudos to him; it's still running to this day. I stepped down many moons ago.

Back then, the tech stacks available were limited and rudimentary. I taught myself ASP VBScript and started creating applications for clients, as well as administrative tooling to help with web server configuraiton and maintenance. (ASP.NET wasn't even a sparkle in Microsoft's eye yet…)

After graduating, I intended to take a gap-year and see Europe, like most good Brits. For interest's sake I contacted some recruiters via the uk.comp.jobs.offered Usenet newsgroup. Or something like that. Yes, recruiters were on Usenet. And yes, I fell in to a job within 3 weeks of completing my uni course. And yes, I'm still trying to get the travel bug out of my system. And yes, I don't know if I ever will.

Within the first few months of working, I discovered PHP and the broader LAMP Stack and continued on that path for many years, building everything from small brochure-ware sites to large e-commerce platforms and custom CMS systems.

From co-founding the Open Source Developers Conference, Melbourne PHP User's Group, BuzzConf Technology Festival, and more, my journey in developer advocacy has always been hands-on and community-focused.

Philosophy of Developer Advocacy

At Auth0, I was trying to solve the problem of helping developers understand the ease of use for a devtool that required a local development environment. The “time to wow”, as it is often referred to, was 15+ minutes. So I devised and built the “Login Challenge” which reduced that to a couple of minutes. A now gamified experience, it became one of their most effective adoption drivers, and was rolled out to event booths globally.

But community building isn't just about awareness and adoption; it's about creating spaces where developers can solve real problems together. To this end, I proposed and led the creation of the Identity and Security Meetup that would bring together experts and enthusiasts across more than just the identity space. In collaboration with colleagues and members of the champion program, I grew this program to 8+ cities globally.

Direct community engagement aside, I also focus on creating actionable content that inspires developers to try something new. Whether it's:

my goal is to make learning engaging and practical.

Strategic Engagement

That philosophy of “show, don't just tell” scales beyond individual content. Developer advocacy becomes strategic when you can align that hands-on approach with business goals and measurable outcomes.

At Arcjet, I secured partnership commitments from two major companies for product integrations which were projected to result in a 100X growth of the userbase.

I've also leveraged external opportunities to reach others' networks through live streams and podcasts, or providing support to hackathons.

What I've learned is that DevRel puts you in a unique position to bridge developers using your product and everyone else in the company. At Auth0, my Login Challenge demos became sales tools that pre-sales engineers used in customer calls. At Arcjet, I'd field complex implementation questions from the community and turn them into product feedback that shaped our roadmap. This cross-functional impact is what makes the role both challenging and worthwhile.

Current Projects

I'm currently building BraidFlow, reimagining conversational AI with threaded conversations between AI actors and humans to minimize context drift and poisoning. I also recently shipped Deplotify, a deployment notification platform built using modern AI coding assistants.

I'm passionate about AI safety and ethics, helping developers understand both the transformational opportunities and the guardrails needed for responsible AI development. Through my current projects, I'm blogging about the experience of creating production AI applications with proper safety measures.