James Coglan
Senior Developer at dxw
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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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 (15)
Github contributions (5)
songkick/oauth2-provider
Nov 2010 - Aug 2013
Simple OAuth 2.0 provider toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:262 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily focused on improving the OAuth 2.0 provider toolkit. Their work involved adding and enhancing error handling mechanisms within the authorization process. These changes include immediately redirecting users upon encountering bad request parameters, indicating a focus on robustness and user experience. The changes were also applied to the test suite to ensure comprehensive and reliable validation of the authorization flow.
oauth
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
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