James Blackwood-sewell
Developer Marketing at ParadeDB
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Blackwood-sewell is a developer-focused marketer and senior engineering contributor with nine years of experience in developer relations, product marketing, and PostgreSQL-focused backend engineering. Based in Auckland, he builds SQL-first developer products—most recently leading developer marketing at ParadeDB to deliver full-text search in Postgres as an alternative to Elasticsearch. He’s held senior advocacy and leadership roles at Timescale/TigerData and cut his teeth as a PostgreSQL team lead and architect at Jirotech, bringing deep operational and database expertise. An active open-source contributor, he has made substantive backend contributions to pgrx, improving Postgres extension support in Rust around bgworker, SPI iterators, shared memory and tooling integration. Known for preferring IC impact over management when it accelerates product value, he blends hands‑on systems work with community growth and ecosystem strategy. That combination makes him effective at turning low-level database capabilities into developer-friendly narratives and products.
9 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at University of Canterbury
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (7)
shared-memory10
rust10
postgresql10
apidoc9
api9
postgrest8
rust-lang8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
pgcentralfoundation/pgrx
Apr 2020 - Mar 2022
Build Postgres Extensions with Rust!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 26 commits, 14 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the back-end development of the `pgrx` project, focusing on building Postgres extensions with Rust. Their work included adding core headers for functionalities like bgworker, SPI iterators, and shared memory, which are critical for the extension's internal workings. They also refactored the SPI code to integrate with Rust iterators, enhancing the usability of the extension. Furthermore, they improved the project's tooling by addressing issues related to the integration with `cargo-pgx` and addressing bugs related to signal handling, socket directories, and control-c.
postgresql-databasepostgresql-extensionrustrustlangextensions
jamessewell/mapproxy
Feb 2018 - Jun 2021
Contributions:3 pushes in 3 years 4 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.