Benton Jackson is one of two “old hacks” at Blue Earth. He’s been programming since junior high, in the days of paper tape on a 110 baud teletype. He learned early that good code organization was important, so when “structured programming” was invented it was quite natural. Much later, when he found out about “object oriented programming”, he realized he had been thinking like that all along, and now knew what to call it, and had language features to support it.

Ben started his first job programming in High School, in a project called “Microcomputers in Education” at the school district central office. He wrote educational programs for the Commodore Pet.

Ben went to college at the U of MN, in the Computer Science department. He needed to pick a specialization, but most of them seemed like they were based on a specific technology, and would become obsolete quickly. So he picked “Theory of Computing” as his specialty, because he thought that with good theory knowledge, he can learn and apply any technology quicker. This is why he’s the “Mad Scientist” of Blue Earth. At college he learned Pascal, Snobol, Lisp, and Fortran, as well as a couple assembly languages, COMPASS and Macro11.

After a brief stint attempting to sell vacuum cleaners, Ben worked part time during college writing educational software for the Pet, C64, Apple II, Amiga, and PC Jr. He wrote in BASIC, Modula2, C, and Rexx. He also developed a database engine for the ARexx scripting language on the Amiga.

After college, he worked in 3D Computer Graphics, first for a hardware developer, and then for a games developer. Most of his work was in C++, with a little x86 assembly.

Ben has been working for Blue Earth Interactive since before it was founded. Wait, what? Actually, he started with the predecessor to Blue Earth, “Blue Earth Internet”, which was a part of Creative Promotions. When Mark, the owner, split off BEI, it was just Mark, Nick, and Ben. Web development was new to Ben when he started, but with his background in theory found it easy to pick up PHP and MySQL and run with it.

When Ben isn’t busy designing databases or interfering in other people’s projects, he “collects hobbies”. He finds new things and learns them until it becomes hard to learn, and moves on to the next hobby. Later, he’ll come back to the hobby again and find it’s easy to learn again. Having multiple hobbies keeps Ben creative, both in his hobbies and at work. His most active hobby at the moment is making pens on his lathe to give away.

Ben is also a private pilot with an instrument rating, but hasn’t flown in a few years. That’s one of those hobbies where it’s safer to be doing it a lot, or not at all.

The most important thing Ben has learned in his long career is that there is no “best” way of doing things. There are always many good ways of doing things, and usually each one has a tradeoff.

• What’s your typical development work-flow?
• Develop locally, test locally if I can. SFTP files up to server for testing on server. I use a local DB if I can.
• What is your ideal operating system for development?
• Mac and Windows together via Parallels
• I prefer working on the Mac because it just seems to work better. I originally switched when I was dabbling in iOS stuff. I installed parallels because my current project is .NET, and I need to do that in windows, but I don’t want to move my life over to another platform. Actually, my real preferred OS is Amiga-OS, but that died a long time ago.
• How do you like to interface with a database?
• PHPMyAdmin, MySQLWB, MS-SQL Server Management Studio
• I use PHPMyAdmin for administering existing databases. I use MySQLWB for designing new databases. I use MS-SQL Server Management Studio  for my current project, because that’s in .NET
• What is your IDE of choice?
• Visual Studio, Netbeans, XCode
• For .NET – Visual Studio is the only choice, For PHP – Netbeans. Zend got buggy and expensive, this was free and seemed to work well for what I need. I use XCode for debugging, and that works great. For iOS – XCode is the only choice
• What text editor do you prefer?
• BBedit
• Very lightweight editor that still has code highlighting and other programming features.
• How do you like to communicate?
• Email, AIM, Acoustical engagement (speaking) , Pivotal, Basecamp
• Talking is best, because you get nuances. You can tell the difference between when a coworker is playing devils advocate or if they just think you’re an idiot. Without that nuance there can be friction. Otherwise, I use the other methods as needed.
• What is your favorite Diff/Merge program?
• Whatever is convenient on the platform I happen to be on
• I don’t use it often enough to have a preference, and usually there’s a default for whatever IDE or SVN client I’m working with.
• Which browser do you like to use for development?
• Chrome
• Chrome seems the most stable for my daily use, so that’s what I use for developing too.
• Any other comments?
• I am a strong believer in working smarter instead of harder. Sometimes, you need to step back and relax, think about what you’re doing, and reevaluate. Sometimes a good idea can save days or even weeks of work. In other words, my brain is my most important developer tool.

Corki has been Ben’s assistant since he started with Blue Earth 11 years ago. She’s a newfie-lab mix, the daughter of Nick’s dog Rocky. She’s very important in keeping Ben’s stress level low, and goes with him everywhere, even to Blue Earth on meetings day.

Just like her human, she has many hobbies. Her favorite hobby is frisbee, closely followed by agility. She tried fly-ball but didn’t like all the barking. She also loves riding in the canoe, camping, and going for long hikes. She likes hiding chew bones in dirty laundry.

As she gets older, her favorite hobby is becoming holding down the couch.

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