James Birtles
Developer at Aircast Group Ltd
England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Birtles is a seasoned software engineer with 12 years of experience building resilient, developer-friendly web applications and libraries across front-end and full-stack domains. He has strong expertise in modern TypeScript ecosystems and frontend frameworks—particularly Svelte, React, SvelteKit, SolidJS and Node.js—and has contributed accessibility, validation and formatting improvements to high-profile open-source projects like Svelte and its Prettier plugin. James has driven technical direction in product-focused teams, leading rewrites using functional patterns (Effect) and type-safe techniques such as branded types to harden authorization flows and observability. As a director and hands-on developer he balances strategic leadership at Aircast Group with day-to-day delivery at companies from Microsoft to startups, and now Techex. He combines pragmatic engineering with an eye for developer experience, often improving tooling and error reporting that benefits entire ecosystems. Based in England, he pairs a formal background in mathematics and computer science with a sustained commitment to shipping accessible, maintainable code.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Mathematics and Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science at The Sixth Form College, Farnborough
Stackoverflow
33reputation
2kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
ui-design10
pretier10
uid10
front-end-development10
prettify10
svelte10
template-engine9
templater9
compiler-compiler9
code-formatting9
template-tags9
compiler9
typescripts8
typescript-types8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
sveltejs/prettier-plugin-svelte
Aug 2018 - Nov 2019
Format your svelte components using prettier.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 61 commits, 33 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the Svelte component formatting plugin. Their work included adding features for formatting Svelte components, such as handling animation and binding directives, raw mustache tags, and spread attributes. They also implemented testing frameworks and added a series of tests to validate the plugin's functionality. Furthermore, they introduced improvements for formatting text elements and enhanced code formatting.
svelte-componentssvelteprettiersveltejs
sveltejs/svelte
Jan 2018 - Aug 2018
web development for the rest of us
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 4 PRs, 15 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the Svelte project by improving the accessibility of the code and adding end positions to warnings and errors. They also worked on component validation, specifically in the validation of element attributes and bindings, adding more accurate error reporting. The user also added support for object and array patterns. These changes indicate a focus on improving code quality and developer experience within the Svelte framework.
compilertemplatewebappweb-appsui
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