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

Education

Sep 2002 Jun 2005

University of Greenwich

Multimedia Technology (BSc)

2.1

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.

Connect

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