Ben Combee, senior software engineer at Roku, occasional watch & hardware hacker
Ben is involved with several projects. These include:
Past projects that I'm not actively working include:
Ben has had a active life in the mobile and embedded software worlds.
Ben grew up in north Georgia, went to college in Atlanta at Georgia Tech, then moved to Austin to work for Motorola's paging products group in IC design verification. After a few years, he moved into compilers, working on the CodeWarrior tools made by Metrowerks. He left for a startup, Veriprise, where he learned Palm OS programming, when them led to Ben becoming lead developer on CodeWarrior for Palm OS. That led to a job at PalmSource in developer relations, then a engineering job at Palm working on the Foleo netbook. In 2008, Ben and his then-fiancée headed to Brooklyn, NY. While there, Ben went off to work at Mozilla on their mobile web browser but returned to Palm after a year to work as engineering lead on the webOS developer relations team. In 2011, he and his now-wife Annelies returned to Austin to start their new life of computer hacking and urban farming. In 2012, Ben was promoted to technical lead on the Enyo JavaScript framework, and in 2013, his group was transferred to LG Electronics where they continued development of their open source JS framework with an emphasis on supporting application development for LG's SmartTV projects.
In 2014, Ben moved on to a new role as a senior developer at Roku working on embedded software for new products, including the Roku TV platform. He's been involved in the release of Roku TV models for TCL, Hisense, Insignia, Sharp, and other brands. His focus has been on ATSC digital television and EIA-608/CEA-708 closed caption technology. He's now part of the Roku OS core development team, working on software optimization and system architecture.