James Broad

CTO

About

James is a CTO with over a decade of experience in the industry. He has a passion for helping businesses and individuals succeed online, and has a track record of delivering results.

He's customer obsessive, seeing design and technology as a tool to solve problems and add a bit of delight to people's lives.

James is a generalist straddling all things business, management, and mentoring and particularly excels when getting stuck in with all aspects of development from architecture & DevOps to creating immersive frontend experiences.

Work history

Jun 2017 Present

CTO at OnCare

London, UK

Took prototype from 0 customers to over 100 SMBs with thousands of users depending on us to run their businesses.
  • Django
  • React
  • React Native
  • AWS
Feb 2016 Jun 2017

Lead Developer at Thread.com

London, UK

  • Modernised Thread's frontend with a React & its associated ecosystem
  • Introduced new development and build process
  • Created delightful user experiences using exacting design standards, refined animations and rich interactions
  • Worked closely with marketing to optimise the sign-up flow, browsing experience and transactional emails
  • Most projects were instrumented using multi-variant testing for data-driven development
  • Django
  • React
  • CSS
Jun 2015 Feb 2016

Lead Developer at Bloom & Wild

London, UK

  • Responsible for stabilizing and maturing the platform for the high-growth e-commerce provider
  • Introduced unit testing, end to end automated testing and a continuous deployment process to get new features in front of customers within 10 minutes
  • Responsible for hiring and managing developers
  • Projects delivered include same-day delivery functionality, product landing pages and general enhancements to their platform
  • Frameworks & services used: A​ngularJS,​ K​arma, ​N​odeJS, ​S​ASS, ​G​runt,​ J​ade, ​CodeShip, ​A​WS
  • Angular
  • Ruby on Rails
  • CSS
  • Node
Jun 2012 Jun 2015

Senior Developer at moo.com

London, UK

  • Delivered a number of presentations, published blog posts, documented best practices
  • Hired and managed a number of senior developers
  • Lead R&D effort with designers and UX team to inform product development future focus
  • Lead engineering development of work on large scale B2B offering that went on to become the biggest revenue-generating project
  • Created frontend toolkit (HTML5, CSS3 & jQuery modules) with designers to keep maximum consistency and reusable components
  • Proposing and implementing leading-edge tools like TypeScript & Docker
  • Created a JavaScript Image Uploader & Library used for making print products
  • PHP
  • Java
  • React
  • Backbone
  • CSS
Jan 2011 Apr 2012

Senior Developer at BBC Weather

London, UK

  • Led frontend heavy projects including interaction, animation, performance, accessibility
  • Steered the team to adopt Kanban as a means to ensure the ambitious project was delivered on time
  • Developed a highly interactive SVG chart to represent complex average conditions data
  • Worked with an external agency to create an animated page ambience (didn’t go live as any animation was too taxing)
  • Improved overall CI strategy and added a custom application performance monitoring suite into Hudson
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
Jul 2007 Dec 2010

Web Developer at Yahoo!

California, USA & London, UK

  • Lead developer on the transition of finance.yahoo.com/portfolios from a 10-year-old XML/XSLT stack onto a bespoke PHP MVC platform
  • Lead developer of finance.yahoo.com/news which needed to support 10+ languages, improved the design, UX and SEO and made the site capable of handling millions of pageviews per month
  • Merged a message board codebase previously forked by many countries into a unified platform and added internationalisation and localisation to reduce future fragmentation
  • Improved features on European Yahoo! homepages including the top stories and search modules
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
Feb 2006 Jul 2007

Web Developer at Time Out Communications

London, UK

  • Re-developed both timeout.com/film and timeout.com/shop from legacy codebases to modern re-designed, MVC-powered, semantic, SEO-friendly versions
  • Added new features and editorial controls throughout the site
  • Administered the MySQL database that powered the site
  • Mentored junior team members on a range of web development best practices
  • PHP
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript

Side projects

Jan 2022 Present

Hiya

Personal websites for creators looking for new opportunities.

Jan 2019 Present

Inferoo

I created a service to aggregate calendars, weather, news and more to synthesise it in email form every morning so I could start the day better informed.

Education

Sep 2002 Jun 2005

University of Greenwich

Multimedia Technology (BSc)

2.1

Contact me

I'm open to be contacted about:
  • Advising companies
  • Mentoring
  • Participating in User Research
  • Partnering on Side Projects
  • Raising funding
  • Speaking at Events
  • Speaking on podcasts