James Cleveland

full stack / react native / devops

e-mail: jc@blit.cc
github: @radiosilence

Experienced polyglot engineer with a huge breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding, working in multiple languages across a wide range of commercial frontend, backend, devops, and embedded contexts. Lives for problem solving and optimising, and thrives in the challenges of the London tech startup scene.

Communicating complex technical solutions and to stakeholders and fellow engineers in a way that they can relate to is also key to my approach, as if people can’t understand what’s happening, the most appropriate solution is unlikely to be reached.

Passionate about having reproducible infrastructure using CI/CD and IaC (GitOps).

As a natural creative, what drives me is a job where I wake up every day and build something interesting.

Recent Work

Senior Full Stack Engineer, Apolitical Apr 2024 — Aug 2024

Key Skills: Next.js, NestJS, React, Kubernetes, SCSS, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vite, Express

Senior Cloud Native Engineer, EngineerBetter Jan 2022 — Jan 2024

Key Skills: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Azure, Concourse, Python, Go, CSPM, Cloud Foundry, BOSH

Lead Full Stack / Mobile Engineer, Superbike Factory (Freelance) Jan 2021 — Apr 2023

Key Skills: React, AWS, TypeScript, React Native, API Gateway, AWS CDK, REST API, DynamoDB

Lead Developer, ROXi Jan 2020 — Jan 2022

Key Skills: React, Astro, AWS, TypeScript, React Native, Java, Swift, Node.js, WebSockets

Lead Frontend Developer, Sapien Interactive (Freelance) Jan 2020 — Jan 2024

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, React Native, Node.js, Firebase, MobX-State-Tree, WebSockets

Senior Mobile Developer, Zopa Financial Services Jan 2018 — Jan 2020

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, React Native, Redux, Zeplin, Java, Kafka, Kotlin, Swift

Skills

TypeScript / JavaScript

TypeScript, Next.js, Astro, NestJS, Generics, async/await, Node.js, React Native (+ Swift/Kotlin/Java), Expo, React, Zustand, esbuild, bun, Redux, MobX-State-Tree, Flux, Immer, ReasonML, RxJS, Webpack, Vite, GraphQL, WebSockets, Socket.IO, ZeroMQ, Oao, Lerna, i18n, Axios, Express

Python

Typing, Django, Dataclasses, Flask, Twisted, Cython, Jinja2, Celery, pypy, pip (contributor), libev, uWSGI

Devops

Docker, Terraform, AWS, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, ELB, VPC, Security Groups, AMIs, CloudFront, Cognito, CloudFormation, CDK, SES, SQS, CloudWatch, ECS, Fargate, EC2, EFS, RDS, Lambda@Edge, IAM, Route53, OAI, Apigee, CircleCI, Docker, Concourse, Mesos, Marathon, BitBucket Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, GitOps, Traefik, Unikernels, NanoVM, Azure Policy

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Couchbase, MSSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, GraphQL, CouchDB

Styling

Tailwind, DaisyUI, CSS, Mobile First, Bootstrap, SASS, SCSS, LESS, Foundation, HTML5, XML

Other Languages

Go / Golang, Kotlin, Swift, Java, C# C++, C, x86 ASM, Qt, C30, bash, zsh, JSON, TOML, YAML, HCL

Misc

Git, SVN, BDD, TDD, Vagrant, Nginx, Apache, Agile, JIRA, Trello, Linux, Ansible

Who is James?

I don’t see programming and computers as simply a job, but part of who I am. I think the world is going through very interesting times and it will be passionate programmers and thinkers that will play an important part in shaping it. My current hobbies are photography (events, portrait, street, travel), and I’m an avid cyclist (mainly fixed, but also gravel). When I lived in Brighton I often helped out with putting on shows and DJing club nights. I enjoy going out with friends and finding new bands or other weird and wonderful things to do. I am a keen follower of current affairs, especially from a technical standpoint, and think a lot about the world and am interested by new developments politically and scientifically.

Less Recent Work

Senior Frontend Developer, On The Dot Jul 2017 — Jan 2018

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, Redux, Go, Node.js, API Gateway, Apigee, Auth0

Lead Frontend Developer, SmartFocus Mar 2015 — Jan 2017

Key Skills: React, AngularJS, Redux, Redis, Node.js, flux, WebSockets, Express, ZeroMQ, C++, C#, .NET, Qt

Lead Frontend Developer, Bootbag Jan 2014 — Jan 2015

Key Skills: React, CSS, Redux, HTML, flux, WebSockets

Key Skills: PHP, React, AngularJS, Django, jQuery, Node.js, Linux, nginx, Express, .NET, C#

Web Developer, Freelance Jan 2010 — Jan 2013

Key Skills: PHP, AngularJS, Django, jQuery, Node.js, Flask, Linux, nginx, Apache