About

James is passionate about Circular Economy and Sustainability, now Co-Founder of Circular Way / Sellalong, James is working on proving Circularity models enabled by Technology, to lead towards a more sustainable future.

Full-stack Software Engineer, Team Leader, and CTO. Specialising in Web Development, Product Delivery, Cloud Infrastructure, and Technical Architecture.

Career

James has worked in Web Development professionally since 2006, starting at the University of Newcastle Australia working on the corporate Website in client side development, then moving to server-side Java EE development.

In 2010, James moved to London and worked at the BBC for 4 years, working on Personalisation and Social shared front-end components and services across BBC online using PHP Zend and JavaScript, and also developing architecture solutions for Personalisation systems.

From 2014-2016, James worked at The Guardian as a Senior Full-Stack Developer on a number of areas, including: Editorial Tools (the internal CMS), the User Sign-in service, and then as Team Lead on the Guardian's front-end News website. During his time at the Guardian, he worked with many technologies across the stack, including Scala, Angular JS, ES6, SystemJS, Sass, and AWS.

After the Guardian, James started contracting and consulting with Contino, working with Barclaycard UK to work in modern Continuous Delivery methods and Container based micro-services. This involved working heavily with React, NodeJS, Docker, and OpenShift.

In 2017, James started a contract with Zühlke Engineering, working with HSBC UK on their retail mobile banking app, and supporting micro-services. Primarily focussing on Delivery, improving the path to production. Involved working full-stack with TypeScript, Java, Jenkins, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Throughout 2018, James worked with 11:FS and Capco building Mettle, a challenger bank for small to medium sized businesses. Involved working across most of their systems with React Native, NodeJS, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Concourse CI.

From December 2018 to September 2019, James was the Head of Engineering at the Ambassador Theatre Group, building out their new Digital Platform across their theatre ticketing experience. Achievements included: growing the permanent engineering team from 4 to 11, and launching their new Website built with React, Node JS, AWS ECS, Cloudflare, Terraform, and GitLab CI. Transitioned the team to Serverless architecture utilising AWS Lambda and Cloudflare workers.

November 2019 - June 2020, James worked with Stuffstr as a Lead Engineer, helping them grow their Engineering team, and building out their systems, which provided a simplified buy-back process for used clothing and footware for adidas Infinite Play. This included building an internal system for managing the warehouse for processing the used items when they were received, ready for resale.

In 2020, James started working with LEBOM, a peer-to-peer betting app, as a CTO Consultant, building their MVP Mobile App and backend systems. This involved designing and building their systems and app from scratch, utilising distributed serverless infrastructure in AWS ready for scale, and React Native for the app. Typescript was used for both the backend and front-end, as well as GraphQL APIs.

At the start of 2021, James Co-Founded Sellalong / Circular Way as CTO, a company focussed on ending consumer waste by making circularity a part of every purchase. By partnering with Brands and integrating directly into their eCommerce websites, we provide their customers a fully Circular experience.

Contact

Please contact me on LinkedIn

Website

Website built with React, and Typescript. Source code on Github.