Ben Surgison
Senior Developer at The Planning Inspectorate
Chippenham, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Surgison is a Senior Developer with over two decades of hands-on experience delivering full-project lifecycles across government, finance, healthcare, telecoms and retail, and currently works at The Planning Inspectorate. He combines deep front-end and Node.js back-end expertise with a strong testing and automation focus—evidenced by contributions to the widely used GOV.UK Prototype Kit where he added Cypress integration tests and UI checks. Comfortable in both consultancy and in-house roles, he has repeatedly built reusable platforms and plugins, emphasising maintainability, Dockerised deployments and shared code across services. Ben is adept at quickly switching domains and stacks, a skill sharpened by long-term contracting and founding his own consultancy, AjaxScape. He keeps skills current through independent experimentation with new tools and approaches outside office hours, ensuring practical alternative solutions are always available. Based in Chippenham, he brings a pragmatic, customer-facing approach to complex technical problems.
4 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at The University of AucklandOrewa College
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (7)
javascript10
cypress10
prototyping10
front-end-development10
test-automation10
testing10
sass9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
alphagov/govuk-prototype-kit
May 2022 - Jan 2023
Rapidly create HTML prototypes of GOV.UK services
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Front-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:14 releases, 386 reviews, 305 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben focused on adding and testing functionality to the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, with particular emphasis on the integration of Cypress for automated testing. They wrote and tested Cypress integration tests, including tests for gulp functionality, watching sass files, route files, and image files to ensure that the prototype kit was functioning correctly. The user also created tests for the start page, along with tests for checkboxes and service name, demonstrating a focus on testing the user interface.
govprototype-kitprototypingprototypesgovernment
alphagov/govuk-prototype-kit-task-list
Jan 2023 - Aug 2023
Task list pattern - plugin for the GOV.UK Prototype
Contributions:7 reviews, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 7 months
govprototypegovukpatterntask-list
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