James Davis
Staff Software Engineer at Salsify
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Davis is a pragmatic Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience leading teams and building web applications and APIs, currently at Salsify in Charlottesville. He blends hands-on development with mentorship, advocating for best practices that balance code quality and delivery velocity. His background spans full-stack work—TypeScript/Ember front ends and Python/Django back ends—including technical leadership of the Open Science Framework and running his own web services business. An active open-source contributor, he has improved Ember tooling and TypeScript typings in prominent projects like ember.js and DefinitelyTyped, and strengthened test suites for ember-concurrency and ember-template-lint. He excels at translating research and domain requirements into reliable, production systems for distributed users across institutions and countries. Outside the obvious, he pairs engineering leadership with long-term product stewardship—having led large, multi-national data projects and maintained services for over a decade.
13 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Electrical and Computer Engineering / Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering / Computer Science at The University of Texas at AustinBS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
English, Spanish, Portuguese
Stackoverflow
39reputation
2kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
static-typing10
javascript10
typesc10
python10
django10
testing10
typescript10
typescript-definitions10
type-definition10
type-system10
optional-typing10
emberjs10
lint10
strong-typing10
ember10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
CenterForOpenScience/osf.io
Jun 2017 - Jan 2020
Facilitating Open Science
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:92 commits, 64 PRs, 51 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James contributed primarily to the back-end aspects of the OSF.io repository, with commits showing modifications to Django templates and views, as well as test files. The user added a "My Quick Files" link to the navigation bar. Code differences also reveal work related to merging branches and updating test suites and database interactions within the project.
pythonsciencedjango-rest-frameworkdjangojavascript
DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
Apr 2018 - Dec 2021
The repository for high quality TypeScript type definitions.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:74 reviews, 16 commits, 20 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the type definitions for the Ember.js framework within the DefinitelyTyped repository. Their work involved implementing type definitions for new features, such as `buildInstance` for Ember applications and engines, and ensuring compatibility with newer versions. They also focused on updating author lists and augmenting existing type definitions, including the addition of the `templateOnlyComponent` and routing utilities. These contributions demonstrate a focus on maintaining and enhancing the type safety and usability of Ember.js within TypeScript projects.
typescript-definitionstype-definitionshigh-qualitydtsdefinitions
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