combee.net
Ben Combee, webOS, Enyo, & open-source developer, occasional hardware hacker
Projects
Ben is actively working on several projects. These include:
Past projects that I'm not actively working on anymore include:
- Mozilla Firefox web browser for mobile devices
- RGB LED Shield Arduino-based open-source hardware project
- Veg Out Austin! website
- benani.net wedding website
- Combee on Palm OS weblog
- palmoswerks weblog
- palmos.techwood.org Palm OS software development
Biography
Ben has had a pretty active life in the mobile software world. It's documented in a more-or-less formal way on Ben's Stack Overflow Careers CV.
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 wife returned to Austin to start their new life of computer hacking and urban farming.
Contact
- You can send email to combee at techwood dot org.
- You can find out about future and past conferences and event's where Ben has been involved via his extensive Laynrd profile page.
- You can read Ben's recent restaurant reviews on Yelp and look at some of Ben's pictures on Flickr.
- The Life Unwired is Ben's mostly-neglected weblog hosted on LiveJournal.
- Ben frequently tweets about webOS and software development. His account is @unwiredben.
- Ben has his personal forks of a number of random projects on GitHub as unwiredben.
- Ben has a few posts on Google+, but he mostly ignores it.
- Ben's also on the Facebook, but he doesn't usually friend people he doesn't know in real life.
- Ben is unwiredben on Xbox Live where he mostly plays arcade and indie games.
- Ben occasionally comments on articles at Hacker News as unwiredben.
Trivia
- Ben is not related to the Pokémon named "Combee". However, he does carry some of the Combee Pokémon cards with him to use as calling cards.
- In 1996, Ben won third place in the O'Henry Pun-Off "Punniest of Show" competition. He never returned to competitive punning.
- For many years, Ben was the technical director of "The Show With No Name", Austin's favorite public-access television program where we helped write many of the show's opening lines.
- Ben has a gigantic classic video game collection which includes almost 500 unique games for the Atari 2600. He has attended five Classic Gaming Expo shows and has written a small Atari 2600 demo that NYC Resistor showed at Maker Faire 2010.
- Ben was a key engineer in the StabbyPhone project at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in 2010 where NYC Resistor members hacked a pneumatic robot arm into waving a plastic knife around while being controlled by a interactive voice response system.