James is a cloud engineer and architect from Central Pennsylvania. Currently a Navanaut, James shifted from largely private industry focused engineering to Civic Tech in 2020. They are focused on making government services available and accessible to all, especially those that are currently underserved.

During High School, James studied Computer Information Systems at the Center for Arts and Technology, Brandywine Campus. They site their CIS teacher, Mr. Fuchs, for giving them the motivation needed to continue their education and do what they love. After graduating form Avon Grove High School in 2003 and receiving a certificate with platinum seal from CAT, James continued their education at Central Pennsylvania College in Summerdale, PA.

Upon graduating with a Bachelors Degree in Information Technology in 2007, James started working as a full-time Software Engineer at WorkXpress. They worked with a small team of engineers to develop WorkXpress’s Platform as a service (PaaS) that allows users to develop business software without the need for writing code.

Looking to make some changes in life, James left WorkXpress in 2011 to join AllPlayers.com. As a lead developer, they managed a small team of developers and worked on Drupal and Drupal Commerce full-time, allowing them to contribute back to the community on a regular basis.

In 2014, James continued their work with Drupal by taking the position of Cloud Software Engineer for Acquia. As a Senior Engineer and Scrum Master on the Cloud Data team, they helped to design and deliver a database and distributed file system service used by Acquia Cloud to support customer sites.

After 13 years working for the private sector, James decided that they wanted to use their skills and expertise to help real people over private organizations. They joined the Civic Tech industry in 2020 as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer for Nava PBC. As the logging technical lead for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), they provided a logging and monitoring framework for CMS Cloud hosted applications. In this capacity, they worked closely with the ACA Marketplace to help provided the services necessary for a smooth Open Enrollment period two years in a row, as well as a Special Enrollment Period ordered as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

James’ specialties include Drupal, back end development, web services, cloud computing, large scale distributed systems, infrastructure automation, and system architecture.

James is Non-Binary and uses they/them pronouns.

Portfolio

This is a small representation of some of the work I have completed under contract and as a full-time employee.