James Garbutt
Open Source Lead at Freelance
Greater Leeds Area United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarJames Garbutt is an Open Source Lead and seasoned software engineer with 12 years of experience, currently freelancing from the Greater Leeds area. He combines full‑stack and front‑end expertise with a strong focus on TypeScript, tooling, and web components—contributing to high‑profile projects like nx, Storybook, Polymer, Lit, and VueUse. James is skilled at improving developer experience and maintainability, from migrating large monorepos to modern libraries (picocolors, picomatch, node:fs) to tightening TypeScript types and ESLint rules. He has a knack for hardening test suites and fixing subtle async and race conditions across libraries such as chokidar and Chai. Aside from feature work, he often surfaces non‑obvious compatibility issues (shadow DOM, composedPath, active element observation) that improve cross‑browser and framework robustness. Pragmatic and detail‑oriented, he excels at bridging tooling, tests, and component design to make large open‑source ecosystems more reliable and usable.
12 years of coding experience
English
Stackoverflow
26reputation
145reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (89)
parserator10
lit-element10
parser10
storybook10
material-components10
testing10
plugin-development10
autocomplete10
webpages10
type-definition10
shadow-dom10
tslint10
nxos10
astm10
javascript10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
lit/lit
Oct 2018 - Dec 2022
Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:76 reviews, 4 commits, 21 PRs in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on updating and maintaining the Lit library, a library for building web components. Their contributions included fixing tests and updating dependencies, specifically TypeScript. They also made several changes to the SSR (Server-Side Rendering) components, including migrating tests, and supporting custom element analysis. The user also added support for elements with no reactive props.
web-componentslit-htmllit-elementhtml-templateslit
chaijs/chai
Jan 2023 - Jul 2026
BDD / TDD assertion framework for node.js and the browser that can be paired with any testing framework.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:3 releases, 64 reviews, 38 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James focused on improving the test suite and expanding test coverage for the Chai.js assertion framework. Their contributions included fixing bugs related to `toThrow` assertions, ensuring compatibility across various Node.js versions and virtual machines, and refactoring the test setup using Prettier for code formatting consistency. The user also upgraded dependencies and enhanced the assertion library's behavior and error handling.
assertion-frameworkbddnodejstddtesting
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