James Ducker
Principal Engineer at Versent
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Ducker is a Principal Engineer based in Sydney with 13 years’ experience designing and automating large-scale, globally distributed systems, primarily on AWS. He specialises in infrastructure-as-code and network architecture, having built automation-controlled networks using Transit Gateway, Direct Connect and Site-to-Site VPN for both internal and customer-facing systems. James blends hands-on coding (Python, Lambda, Step Functions) with platform design and has a history of migrating complex on-prem environments to cloud-native, fully automated platforms. He’s equally comfortable in enterprise and startup settings and has worked as both a long-term product engineer and a consultant delivering hard problems made simple. A committed mentor and teacher, he intentionally leads by example—still shipping code while coaching engineers in problem analysis and empathetic team practices. Outside work he contributes to open-source projects like the Vanilla forum, fixing core bugs and improving code quality, reflecting attention to detail across both infrastructure and application layers.
13 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma IT, Website Development, Diploma IT, Website Development at TAFE NSWHSC, HSC at Sydney Grammar SchoolBachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Information Technology, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Information Technology at University of Technology Sydney
English
Stackoverflow
578reputation
61kreached
10answers
2questions
Github Skills (13)
debug10
php10
message-board10
forum10
javascript9
java6
aws-lambda6
boto6
pytest6
jquery6
python6
if-statement6
ubuntu6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
vanilla/vanilla
Jun 2015 - Aug 2019
Vanilla is a powerfully simple discussion forum you can easily customize to make as unique as your community.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 6 PRs, 15 comments in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the Vanilla forum software by fixing bugs and improving code quality. Their work included correcting logic errors in core functions related to formatting and draft saving. They also addressed issues in the Flagging plugin, fixing broken array references and other issues to improve the functionality. Furthermore, the user corrected typos and improved cookie handling.
vanilla-forumssimple-discussionphpforumdiscussion-board
jamesinc/selectify
Jan 2013 - Dec 2013
Contributions:22 commits, 1 tag, 2 comments in 11 months
unobtrusivejqueryjavascriptuser-experienceoverlay
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