James

"If I have to do something more than once, I'm writing a script for it."

NodeJS developer, often found working on greenfield projects and/or microservices (ExpressJS), familiar with relational databases (MySQL, Postgres), document-driven databases (MongoDB, RethinkDB, Elasticsearch), templating (Nunjucks, Handlebars, Jekyll) unit testing with code-coverage (Mocha,Istanbul), logging infrastructures (Fluentd, Kibana), as well as dev-ops roles working with dedicated servers and Amazon Web Services.

Also experienced in Bash, Git, HTML-CSS, Python and PHP.

VPI

After reading a detailed article about now Netflix handles scaling & versioning, I wrote a library for ExpressJS APIs to support versioning APIs through headers, with support for older apps & services that are already released and can’t be updated!

npm.im/vpi github.com/jdrydn/vpi

May 2016

Telegram Hero

A module to ease interaction between your NodeJS API & Telegram. It exposes functions to send & receive messages on Telegram. Built upon request so it supports sending attachments through streams.

npm.im/telegram-hero github.com/jdrydn/telegram-hero

May 2016

Car Throttle

Referred to as “the internet’s largest community for car enthusiasts”, I joined Car Throttle straight out of University, replacing their existing PHP project with an event-driven platform built in Node. Worked with a strong team to push out apps for both iOS & Android and now my role is focused on building powerful in-house content aggregation tools for the content teams.

carthrottle.com github.com/car-throttle

June 2015 - Present

KentProjects

Working closely with Matt House and Matt Weeks in my final year of University, to build a platform for my dissertations. Our project was a web-based platform to help new third-year students looking for groups & final-year-projects, and the module convenor was our client. I focused on the backend service, writing the entire stack in PHP (better the devil you know), building my own framework as I went along, and I’m pleased to say the entire project is open-sourced on Github 😎

kentprojects.com github.com/kentprojects

September 2014 - June 2015

Wöbu

A small group of talented individuals building an app for taking animated selfies, back in the days before Snapchat! The idea was to encourage people to take an animated selfie in response to content, such as a news article. I built & maintained the entire API for this app, in Node & MySQL, with the physical images being stored on a Rackspace CDN. I worked closely with a fantastic iOS developer and in a short amount of time we got the app out into peoples hands with all the features the team wanted in an MVP!

December 2013 - February 2014

Markco Media

Mindwork Labs ceased in January 2014 and the team merged into the parent company Markco Media, who ran MyVoucherCodes. My team began work on a new PHP platform for a new product, to ingest endless streams of voucher content & interact with booking APIs, and present the data in a unified format over a REST API. The end product was an app named “More” and I was a core engineer right up to the app release & liased with app developers to integrate platform-specific features such as push notifications. Markco Media was sold to Monitise in July 2014, and I left in August to finish my degree.

myvouchercodes.co.uk markcomedia.co.uk

January 2014 - August 2014

Mindwork Labs

Working in a close team of four, across the entire stack, building and maintaing an automated voucher website called MyDeals. Whilst technically a monolith-style platform, I spent my time building various features & services including an email service for weekly email digests containing voucher recommendations.

July 2013 - January 2014

BSc Computer Science

Leaving with a 2:1 in Computer Science after three years and a placement year (at Mindwork Labs). I chose modules that focused on mobile computing, networking as well as a few business modules. In my final year I worked on a group project called “KentProjects”, a web-based platform for new third-year students looking for a final year project to work on.

2011 - 2015