Ben Arent is Director of Product at Teleport, an infrastructure identity company. He has spent over 15 years in developer tools across Product, DevRel, and UX roles, including Rackspace and SolarWinds, and hosts the Access Control Podcast. He is based in Oakland, California.

What is the Access Control Podcast?

Access Control is a podcast hosted by Ben Arent about how engineering and security teams provide secure access to their infrastructure, featuring conversations with practitioners across the industry.

What does benarent.co.uk cover?

Detailed conference talk summaries, posts on product, security, infrastructure, homelab, and IoT projects, plus a design portfolio dating back to 2006.

About

I’m Ben Arent, Director of Product at Teleport, based in Oakland, California. For the last 20 years, I’ve posted my work online. I’ve worked on a wide range of products and services. I’ve created social communication products for the elderly, redesigned the rental experience, and helped secure infrastructure for the Fortune 100. For the last decade, I’ve worked in the developer tool space, in Product, DevRel and UX roles.

My strengths lie within the intersection of business, community, design and product. I thrive as a generalist within the cracks. As my career has progressed, I’ve come back to review what it means to run and host my own little site. I hope to be sharing more thoughts on the space and expanding my portfolio of events so I can better reach more interesting people to work with.

I joined Teleport in 2019, back when it was called Gravitational, and along the way I’ve hosted the Access Control Podcast, conversations with practitioners about how teams provide secure access to infrastructure. Before Teleport, I was a Lead UX Designer at SolarWinds, and before that a Product Manager at Rackspace working on RedisToGo and Airbrake.io. I landed at Rackspace after moving to San Francisco to co-found a startup that they acquired in 2013.

I’m a 2008 graduate product designer from Middlesex University. This small site was dedicated to my design work and design process. In hindsight, some of those early projects look dated, but I’ve kept them online as a record of how I got here.

Why did you make benarent.co.uk?

Founded in 2006 as my small piece of the Internet. It has been a place to share my design process, portfolio blog and ideas. Projects have been featured on Engadget, BusinessWeek

You can read my blog.

Where would you like to be in 5 years?

I’ve come back to revisit this question 5 years into the future. My past 5 years I’ve not updated my site. I’m looking forward to sharing my experience of co-founding a company, moving to San Francisco and getting acquired by Rackspace. I’m excited for the next 5 years.

2026 update: Another stretch of years on, and the answer above reads like a time capsule. The co-founding, the move, and the acquisition all happened. Since then I’ve gone deep on infrastructure security at Teleport, started a podcast, and picked the site back up to share conference talk notes, homelab experiments, and AI, hardware and IoT side projects. Ask me again in 5 years.