James Barnsley is a co-founder and technical director with 12 years of experience building thoughtful, user-focused web products and leading small teams from concept to production. He blends creative design sensibilities with strong front-end and back-end engineering skills, taking pride in slick UIs, clean code and excellent UX while managing client expectations and budgets. As owner of a freelance studio and co-founder of Tātou he routinely translates napkin sketches into polished deliverables and ongoing technical support. Open-source contributions include UI and state-management improvements to the popular Mopidy/Iris music server frontend, showing attention to documentation, performance and real user workflows. Based in Blenheim, New Zealand, he pairs a marketing and interactive design background with hands-on craftsmanship—DIY projects, photography and music—bringing a practical, multidisciplinary perspective to product problems.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Business Studies, Major in Marketing, Business Studies, Major in Marketing at Massey University
Interactive Design, Web design, Game development, Animation, Film and music, Interactive Design, Web design, Game development, Animation, Film and music at Natcoll
Discover, explore and manage your music library across multiple sources with this beautiful web-based interface. Iris is a Mopidy frontend extension.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:121 releases, 16 reviews, 3044 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily involved modifying the codebase to improve the application's state management and performance. They made changes related to data handling and data structure, including converting null values to undefined for improved destructuring and optimizing loading performance. The changes were focused on enhancing the core functionality of the web interface by focusing on improving its data handling.
Mopidy is an extensible music server written in Python
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 3 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:James's contributions primarily focused on updating the Mopidy-Iris (formerly Spotmop) web client within the Mopidy project. Their work involved modifying the documentation (`docs/ext/web.rst`) to reflect the renaming of Spotmop to Iris, updating screenshots, and amending descriptions of the client. The changes indicate a focus on the user interface and its documentation, making the client more user-friendly and accurately represented within the overall project.
pythonmopidymusic-serverextensiblemusic
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