James Coglan
Senior Developer at dxw
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Coglan is a Senior Developer based in London with 19 years of experience building robust web systems, integrations and developer tools across government, education and media sectors. He blends hands-on backend engineering (notably in Ruby, databases and systems work) with technical leadership—leading cross-disciplinary teams at dxw and steering product-focused teams at FutureLearn. James has a strong open-source footprint, contributing to widely used projects like PouchDB and Git and improving messaging and WebSocket libraries such as Faye, evidencing both protocol-level thinking and practical performance fixes. He’s skilled at unifying disparate back-ends into single front-ends and designing resilient integrations (including CRM syncs and post-merger system consolidations). An Oxford-trained physicist, he pairs analytical rigor with a pragmatic focus on maintainability, automation and developer onboarding.
19 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Physics, Master's degree, Physics at University of Oxford
Stackoverflow
2,108reputation
65kreached
13answers
3questions
websocket
top-1%
Github Skills (57)
algorithm10
data-visualizations10
socket-io10
ss10
algorithms10
javascript10
ssl10
grapher10
back-end-development10
api-design10
testing10
graph10
rmagick10
sslv310
data-visualisation10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
faye/faye
Jun 2009 - Jul 2020
Simple pub/sub messaging for the web
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1421 commits, 30 PRs, 107 pushes in 11 years 3 months
Contributions summary:James refactored the client/transport relationship, moving responsibility for message ID generation and callback mapping into the client. The user also added support for delivering /meta/* messages to the server in batches. These changes are evident in the file modifications of `javascript/protocol/client.js`, `lib/faye/protocol/client.rb`, `javascript/network/transport.js`, `lib/faye/network/transport.rb`, and `javascript/mixins/logging.js`, reflecting a focus on improving the core functionality and messaging efficiency of the pub/sub system. Code related to browser compatibility, and protocol handling of messaging was also updated.
pub-subchatmessaging
faye/faye-websocket-ruby
Nov 2011 - May 2021
Standards-compliant WebSocket client and server
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:421 commits, 22 PRs, 144 pushes in 9 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James implemented a WebSocket client and server in Ruby. Their contributions included adding example code, updating the `lib` directory with required gems, and modifying server code to support SSL connections. They made extensive changes to testing infrastructure, updating tests for TLS connections and adding testing examples. They also performed various refactorings of the code for improved performance, including optimizations of the HybiParser, and implemented the WebSocket protocol and API.
websocketscompliantstandardswebsocketwebsocket-client
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