James Thomas

Experience

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  IBM

  Nov 2007 - Aug 2020

  Lead Developer Advocate for Serverless at IBM Cloud. Responsible for promoting IBM Cloud Functions to global developer audience through in-person events (e.g. conference talks & workshops) and online activities (e.g. blog posts, open-source projects). Delivered over 50+ conference talks, workshops, meetups at international events (US, Europe, Africa, South America). Worked with clients to prototype serverless solutions. Mentored junior developer advocates internally and coordinated global serverless advocacy activities across IBM developer advocacy organisation. Show less Responsible for growing developer communities for IBM Cloud. Helping developers understand how to build scalable cloud applications. Helping the product teams build developer-focused products.Responsibilities included speaking at conferences, writing open-source libraries, SDKs and other technical demos to highlight the platform, attending meetups, producing online content (blog posts, videos, tutorials), resolving issues on StackOverflow and providing developer feedback to the product teams. Spoken at dozens of conferences across Europe and the US, including Twilio SIGNAL, Devoxx and Codemotion. Demos featured on Hacker News and Product Hunt. Show less UI Technical Lead on project to build the first commercial systems using the IBM Watson technology from IBM Research. Led a global development team from the US and UK to deliver the frontend and backend applications for the new Watson platform.My role has involved both deep technical work alongside team management and leadership, putting me in a position of having responsibility for producing key deliverables for the Watson project.Technical activities have included (but were not limited to): high-level design and architecture for the new UI systems, front-end development using Dojo, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, back-end development using Java, JAX-RS, JPA and REST, producing tests for all aspects of the application (unit, integration and acceptance).Team Leadership activities have included (but were not limited to): Development team planning, producing sprint, checkpoint and milestone plans for executive team that correspond to the deliverables set out. Turning high-levels plans into low-level work items that I would assign throughout the team to ensure delivery. Managing day-to-day development, running daily status "scrum" calls, coordinating and resolving inter and intra-team issues and providing high level technical advice on difficult issues, to ensure delivery targets were hit. Co-ordinating UX team to produce UI specifications for new features, reviewing designs and liaising between developers and UX members. Interviewing developers for open positions on the team. Show less Lead developer on the “Dojo Web Builder”, an online web-based build tool for the JavaScript framework. Responsible for the high-level design, architecture, development of both the front-end application (Dojo, JS, CSS, HTML) along with backend RESTful API (Java, REST, JAX-RS) and producing unit, integration and systems tests. The tool went live in February 2011 and produced over 12,000 builds in the first year. Solely responsible for maintaining the platform, responding to user defects, fixing issues and developing improvements. Led the open-sourcing of the project, clearing the legal hurdles within IBM, which was donated back to the community and then coordinated shipping of the project within an official IBM product, "Web 2.0 Feature Pack" for IBM Websphere Application Server. Show less Software consultancy services for IBM clients. Experience of working on multiple client projects in both the public and private sector, including large portions of time working directly on the customer site. Developed client-facing skills including delivering presentations and education for clients in both the U.K and abroad.Notable project highlights:- BBC - EM3 - Senior Front-End Developer:Senior front-end developer in project to develop new digital archive. Responsible for the design, development and testing for their front-end web application, using The Dojo Toolkit, with a client-side MVC and componentised page widgets architecture for the front-end. Java-based backend used JAX-RS to expose RESTful JSON API, wiht internal services layer using JAX-WS, JPA, Lucene and Solr.- Lloyds Banking Group - Project Galaxy - Front-End Developer & Technical Lead.Development of the front-end web application infrastructure for "Galaxy", a programme to develop the next-generation Internet Banking platform for Lloyds Banking Group. Developed custom Java Server Faces tag library, used by offshore development team, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Java, based upon the client’s requirements, alongside formal component design documents, unit testing and user documentation.Acted as front-end SME, responsible for leading resolution around issues in Project Galaxy at Lloyds Group during their crucial "go-live" phase, with real customers being migrated onto the system. Responsible for coordinating efforts of onshore and offshore team to diagnose critical issues directly affecting migration, designing and delivering solutions and interacting with business partners. Helped successful transition of initial customers onto the live system during this key time. Show less

  • Lead Developer Advocate (Serverless)

    Jan 2018 - Aug 2020

  • Senior Open Source Developer

    Jan 2017 - Aug 2020

  • Developer Advocate (IBM Cloud)

    Jan 2014 - Jan 2018

  • UI Technical Lead

    Apr 2011 - Dec 2013

  • Open-Source Software Engineer (Dojo Toolkit)

    Aug 2010 - Apr 2011

  • Emerging Technology Specialist

    Nov 2007 - Aug 2010
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  JT Consulting Services

  Sept 2020 - now

  Software Consultant (Serverless)

  Software Consultancy around Serverless Cloud Applications (AWS Lambda). Advising clients on challenges around adopting serverless, developing software projects using serverless on AWS and mentoring teams around using the serverless technology stack successfully.