Employee Spotlight: From Building Code to Building Teams | Webroot

Webroot is a dynamic team of hard-working individuals with
diverse backgrounds. One of those hard-working individuals is Ben Jackson,
Senior Manager of Software Development, Engineering. Ben started off building
pages in HTML. Now he leads high-performing teams and helps develop architectures
from his home in the UK. We sat down with Ben to find out how he got into
software and where he sees the biggest growth opportunities.

What were you doing before working at Webroot?

I worked at a Smart Meter manufacturer in the UK on their
manufacturing systems and had a short stint at a big UK retailer called Next working
on their retail website.

What brought you to Webroot?

The opportunity to work on some really cool tech, and the
people and culture really attracted me.

What is your role in the company?

I am a Senior Software Development Manager for the Sky
Services and Efficacy tools.

How did you get into software development?

I took a shine to it from an early age when I was trying to
find something to do for a career back at school. I started with the most basic
HTML web page in my spare time by copying the code from a textbook into notepad
and saving it as an html file to see it run. I have never looked back.

What are the primary coding languages you specialize in?

Microsoft .net framework technologies with languages such as
C#. I can use Visual Basic but I’m not a huge fan, and also Java.

What are the advantages of those languages and how do they manifest themselves in your work?

C# is in the core of what we do as a team. All our
applications are in the Microsoft .net framework stack, and through the use of
.net core in a lot of our new projects, we can run our code on any operating
system, making it very easy to deploy, such as in Linux or Docker containers.

What parts of your job require you to think outside of strictly writing code, for example, system architecture, use cases, etc.?

Most of my job requires me to think outside of writing code,
especially working with other engineering teams, product management, and
helping design the architecture of some of our decoupled systems.

What are your proudest accomplishments as a software engineer?

I have contributed to and led numerous software projects in
my career that I am very proud of, but my proudest achievements are in building
teams that work together to deliver something special and noteworthy in terms
of how the team collaborated together, especially my current team.

Where do you think the future of software development is headed?

It is tricky to say as direction changes all the time and
people have such differing opinions, but I feel it will certainly be the
continuation of the cloud (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google
Cloud) being king. The management of the infrastructure to run applications
will further be detached from the developer so that they will just be writing
the code and handing it over to the cloud to deploy, scale and manage for you
automatically. Serverless architectures will become more of the norm, I think.

War Games or The Matrix?

War Games! It was released the year before I was born, but I
have grown up with it through watching re-runs.

What else do you like to do besides coding?

I am a big football (soccer) and sports fan and try to watch
as much as I can. I used to play 11-a-side football as a goalkeeper every
Saturday for a local team until my recent retirement to spend more time with my
two children, who are my biggest focus now outside of work.

Any personal details or stories you’d like to share?

I once appeared on a Portuguese news channel while at a
friend’s stag (bachelor party). I was dressed as a pirate, doing the iconic
scene from the film Titanic at the front of a fishing boat as it came into the
harbor. For some reason, a news crew interviewed us and ran it on the early
evening news with the Titanic theme song by Celine Dion playing in the
background. I have no idea why they found us so interesting!

Want to find out about job opportunities at Webroot? Visit
our careers page.