James Johnston
Software Engineer at Thumbtack
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Johnston is a pragmatic software engineer with nine years of experience building embedded systems, full-stack applications, and developer tooling, currently contributing to Thumbtack’s ProCaptivate team. He led the recovery and launch of a 3D dental scanner at Motion View Software, designing custom PCBs, firmware, and parallelized software that yielded 300% performance gains. Comfortable across hardware and software layers, he’s introduced modern build automation and source control practices and became a trusted direct contributor to upstream CMake after a short period of impactful patches. James is an active open-source contributor with notable backend work on projects like sqlfluff and Debezium, improving SQL templating support and robustness in PostgreSQL streaming. He enjoys mentoring peers and digging into unfamiliar stacks until he can ship reliable solutions, bringing disciplined embedded-systems rigor to cloud and product-focused engineering.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science: Embedded Systems, 3.8 GPA, Magna Cum Laude, B.S., Computer Science: Embedded Systems, 3.8 GPA, Magna Cum Laude at Southern Adventist University
English
Github Skills (22)
debugging10
debug10
javascript10
postgresql10
python10
debezium10
jinjava10
java10
javas10
php10
sql10
change-data-capture10
apache-kafka10
testing9
kafka-connect9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
php-debugbar/php-debugbar
Dec 2016 - Jul 2017
Debug bar for PHP
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 21 PRs, 20 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the php-debugbar project by addressing various bug fixes and enhancements. Their contributions included resolving issues related to the front-end display of data, optimizing the performance of the memcached storage and sql queries, and supporting the use of the debug bar from the command line. The user also enhanced functionality by adding options like disabling the immediate display of AJAX requests and introducing new features such as HTML variable dumping.
flysystemphppackagistdebugphp72
sqlfluff/sqlfluff
Mar 2023 - Jun 2024
A modular SQL linter and auto-formatter with support for multiple dialects and templated code.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 29 PRs, 45 comments in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `sqlfluff/sqlfluff` repository by implementing and refining SQL linting and formatting rules. They added new features for handling templated code, specifically related to Jinja templating. Their work includes modifying existing rules for capitalization and spacing, as well as adding support for PostgreSQL-specific syntax such as CREATE/DROP/ALTER statements for publications and casts. These changes enhanced the functionality of the SQL linter, particularly within templated code and with new PostgreSQL features.
dialectslinterpypisql-lintertemplated
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