James Freeman
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Versatile software engineer with over 15 years of experience solving problems and building solutions
Work Experience
- Built out AI LLM (Gemini) integrated features, focused on summarising reports and analytics. This included generated summaries of reports and responses, as well as an agentic coaching tool, that could give real-time feedback based on the users' questions.
- Created architecture and solution documents for development roadmaps
- Prototyped MVPs and built pitch decks to drive C-suite buy-in
- Incrementally modernised legacy systems, to reduce technical debt
- Oversaw efficiency and cost saving projects, to reduce unnecessary expenditure. Reduced spending on some services by up to 95%, while also reducing our build times and circle CI paid usage by 75%
- Constantly automated internal tasks, to save time and reduce human error
- Competed in an internal hackathon, and won a prize for my AI based project, which was then implemented as a real feature in the platform
- Ran a developer tooling workshop, to promote a culture of caring about developer experience, and sharing time savers, and alternate workflows
- Worked closely with clients to develop applications and services to fulfil their needs
- Improved developer tooling, increasing efficiency, and reducing unreliable tests and CI services. Fixing flaky tests and reducing build times saved hours of developer time each week
- Built multiple video streaming clients, including an Apple TV App of The Year winning application (Univision)
- Mentored junior developers and provided guidance on systems development, so they could punch above their weight
- Rapidly prototyped MVPs for product feasibility assessments
- Won an internal hackathon, by leading a small team to build an AI powered video calling app in one work day.
- Oversaw an in-office and distributed team of developers
- Introduced automated tools and processes to speed up development work, taking new developer setup from hours to minutes.
- Transitioned legacy codebases to modern and updated frameworks
- Set up system documentation to help with onboarding and setting up third party integrations
- Created and implemented code guidelines and testing plans, to maintain software quality
- Made specifications based on product needs and third party API documentation, for developers to turn into real features
- Provided work estimates and technical planning for product managers
- Interfaced with clients to provide technical solutions to proposed problems
- Oversaw a distributed team, and made sure junior members had the support and guidance needed
- Designed and implemented a fully tested GraphQL API layer
- Built a drag and drop WYSIWYG email designer, one of the most sophisticated WYSIWYG designers on the market. It supported all major email clients and browsers, and was modular enough to be re-used for our automation system.
- Worked in the campaigns team, the core team responsible for handling sending of millions of emails per year
- Developed attributions pipelines, to help users better understand where contacts and conversions have come from
- Helped shape company culture as we grew from 13 to 250+ employees.
- Created a report indexing system, in C#, that automatically pulled daily reports from client systems and aggregated the data. This previously took a team several hours every day to compile.
- Designed and implemented a bulk editing tool, that allowed complex mass changes to be made to multiple campaigns in a fraction of the time required to do it manually
- Developed a tool that would automatically disassemble flash files into bytecode, and then perform inspections to verify the existence of functional click tags
- Created landing pages
- Built custom reporting solutions, pulling data from multiple systems, allowing for real-time arbitrage
- Automated and streamlined manual tasks, turning day-long chores into 5 minute tasks.
Skills
Frameworks
- React, React Native, Svelte
- Express, Vite, Symfony, Laravel
- EmberJS, Recoil, Redux, Vue.js
Languages
- Javascript, Typescript
- PHP, Python, Ruby
- Bash, SQL
Data Stores
- MySQL, PostgreSQL
- MongoDB, DynamoDB
- Memcached, Redis
Markup
- JSX, HTML5, CSS, SASS
- Smarty, Twig, Blade
Testing
- Vitest, Jest, Behat
- PHPUnit, Cucumber, Gherkin
- CircleCI, Mocha
Misc
- LLMs, Gemini
- webOS, CI, jQuery, GIT, SEO
- Web Scraping, LAMP, Nginx
- AWS, Twilio, RESTful APIs
- Job Queues: Gearman, RabbitMQ, SQS