James Hilton-balfe
Research And Development Intern at Chesterfield Observatory Restoration Project
Stockport, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Hilton-balfe is a third-year MEng General (Mechatronics) Engineering student at the University of Sheffield with seven years of hands-on experience across software, electronics, and mechanical systems. Currently an R&D intern at Ansys and IT Team Lead at iForge Makerspace, he blends practical fabrication skills (CNC, laser cutters, 3D printing) with software development and project leadership. A strong open-source contributor to core Python projects—typeshed, CPython, and Sphinx—he has helped advance Python’s typing ecosystem (including PEP implementations like Self and type defaults) and improved documentation tooling used widely across the community. He has delivered IoT and environmental sensing solutions using Raspberry Pi and Python, and has led restoration and stakeholder-driven engineering projects, showing an ability to move from CAD proposals to funded delivery. Notably, his work improving static typing in foundational Python repos reflects a focus on long-term code quality and developer tooling beyond typical student projects.
7 years of coding experience
A-Level and GCSEs, Provided upon request., A-Level and GCSEs, Provided upon request. at Altrincham Grammar School for BoysMaster of Engineering - MEng, General Engineering (Specialism in General) with Year in Industry, Master of Engineering - MEng, General Engineering (Specialism in General) with Year in Industry at The University of Sheffield
Github Skills (37)
static-typing10
code-generator10
typesc10
type-inference10
restructuredtext10
python10
discord-js10
sphinx10
stubs10
protocol-buffers10
stub10
discord10
dynamic-typing10
bots10
typescript10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
danielgtaylor/python-betterproto
Jul 2020 - Sep 2022
Clean, modern, Python 3.6+ code generator & library for Protobuf 3 and async gRPC
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 255 reviews, 28 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the `python-betterproto` library, focusing on improvements to code generation, consistency, and optimization. They implemented logic to avoid keyword collisions, updated dependencies, and added type annotations. The user also made improvements to message handling, including the implementation of `__bool__` and `__deepcopy__` methods, and addressed issues related to parsing and serialization of messages, demonstrating a strong understanding of the library's core functionality.
pythonasyncioprotobufpython-3-6grpc
Rapptz/discord.py
Jan 2020 - Jan 2023
An API wrapper for Discord written in Python.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:67 reviews, 23 commits, 30 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:James contributed to the `discord.py` library by implementing new features and improving existing ones. Their work included adding an `is_running` property to the `Loop` class, adding license and encoding declarations, documenting converter raises, and flattening the `AsyncIterator.flatten` method. They also made changes to the command converter, including using `typing.Protocol` and making `commands.Greedy` a `typing.Generic`.
apipythonapi-wrapperdiscordbot
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