About Benson Wong
For more than half his life Benson’s has been making computers do interesting things. In 1995′s pre-Internet Prince Rupert he built the Infinity BBS, enabling happy Rupertites to chat and play videos games online.
In 1996 he won the Northern BC web development challenge and a ticket to the national competition. In grade 11 he was a teaching assistant for the grade 12 computer science class. At 19 years old he moved to Vancouver to join his first dot-com in 1999.
After three dot-coms, two start ups including Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr he joined Sutton Group Realty Services in 2003. His first real taste of management, Benson led his teams to build new web and email technology for thousands of real estate agents across Canada.
An active member of the tech community he is a published author for Zend, consultant for PCWorld, previous director of the Vancouver PHP group and a veteran blogger.
What I’ve been doing (video games!)
For the past 2 years I’ve switched from Real Estate technology to build social games. I left my comfy job as Sutton’s IT manager to be CTO and co-founder of a social games startup . I held the position for more than a year before switching to working with a cool new social game studio in Vancouver. The product is still in stealth mode so I can’t say much other than there will be space ships. Really big space ships.
What I’ve been doing (outdated)
For the past 6 years I’ve been at Sutton and am fortunate enough work on some very cool projects. I started as with basic web programming and Unix system administration and since grown to manage great technology team.
Some of the projects that I have been a part of:
- Sutton’s Email 2.0 Project (from outsourced to in-house qmail ~ 9000 REALTORS®)
- Sutton’s Email 3.0 Project (from qmail to Zimbra, ~ 1TB of email, migrated over 1 month)
- Sutton.com 2.0 (from proprietary CMS to Drupal based website)
- Technology management (4 team members plus numerous contractors)
- Implementation of Active Directory (migrated everybody to group based permission control)
- Implementation of DFS
- Implemented Jira and Confluence (workflows and project management)
- Building an office’s IT infrastructure from scratch (one office, to two + data center + service out sourcing)
Lately I’ve been working on my IT department rather than in it. One level up, enabling my people to figure out solutions instead of just implementing them. This taught me the difference that makes the difference between great and good.
- Team work is paramount.
- A team is not a group of individuals.
- A team is functional. A group of individuals is dysfunctional.
- Your First Team needs to come first.
- You have to know who your First Team is.
- It takes a lot of hard work and time to build a strong team.
- Great teams make great things. Crappy teams make crappy things.
Contact Information
Feel free to email me if you have an interesting technical or technology management question. You can get a hold of me through several methods:
- My vcard: tr.im/mostlygeek
- By Email: mostlygeek@gmail.com
- By Twitter: twitter.com/mostlygeek