Chris James
Principal Engineering Manager at Springer Nature
Dartford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris James is a Principal Engineering Manager based in Dartford with 14 years of software engineering experience and a track record of scaling teams and delivery across publishing and fintech. He has progressed through senior technical and leadership roles at Springer Nature, Acuris, SaltPay and Mergermarket, blending hands-on engineering with people management and architecture responsibility. Comfortable contributing to code and tests himself, he has open-source experience improving HTTP tooling and TDD projects—fixing subtle WebDriver cookie/redirect bugs in the popular http4k toolkit and building test-driven Go web servers. Known for moving between individual contributor and leadership roles (including a brief “funemployed” sabbatical), he combines pragmatic engineering discipline with a focus on quality, automated testing and resilient HTTP services. Educated in computing at Bournemouth University, he brings a balance of deep technical curiosity and delivery-first leadership to complex product teams.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Maidstone Grammar SchoolBSc (Hons) Computing, BSc (Hons) Computing at Bournemouth University
Stackoverflow
11,641reputation
3.2mreached
69answers
80questions
datetime
top-1%
xml
top-1%
winforms
top-5%
validation
top-1%
Github Skills (28)
kotlin10
datetime10
webdriver10
selenium10
testing10
http10
websocket10
selenium-ide10
validation10
http4k10
http-client10
http-server10
go10
xml10
test-automation10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
quii/learn-go-with-tests
Mar 2018 - Nov 2022
Learn Go with test-driven development
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:65 releases, 17 reviews, 946 commits in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Chris contributed to a test-driven development project in Go, learning to build a web server. They implemented a basic HTTP server that served different routes and handled requests to a websocket endpoint. The user's changes included the implementation of a game page in HTML, the addition of functions for managing the game and its state. Their work also incorporated the writing of unit tests for the functionalities.
golangtest-driventestinggotest-driven-development
http4k/http4k
Oct 2017 - Oct 2018
The Functional toolkit for Kotlin HTTP applications. http4k provides a simple and uniform way to serve, consume, and test HTTP services.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on improving the testing of the `http4k` library's web driver functionality. Their contributions involved writing tests to verify correct cookie handling, specifically ensuring that cookies are correctly set and sent during redirects. They also addressed a bug related to unchecked checkboxes in form submissions within the WebDriver implementation. The changes include refactoring tests and code related to web driver and redirect functionality.
http4khttp-clienthttp-servicesservetypesafe
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