James Mead
Director & Software Developer at Go Free Range Ltd
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Mead is a Director and software developer with over 20 years of engineering experience and 14 years in active professional roles, specialising in Ruby and Ruby on Rails while retaining a strong Java and C++ background. He combines hands-on backend development—demonstrated by contributions to the high-profile GOV.UK Whitehall project improving policy publishing, access control and versioning—with proven team leadership and client-facing consultancy experience. An advocate and coach of lean, agile and eXtreme Programming practices, he brings rigorous object-oriented analysis, TDD and pair programming to delivery of both business and engineering applications. Based in Cambridge, he runs a Ruby-focused development co-operative and previously founded a consultancy, showing entrepreneurial instincts alongside technical craftsmanship. His early career in embedded and scientific systems (including field engineering for the British Antarctic Survey) underpins a practical, systems-oriented approach to complex problems.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Electronic & Information Sciences, 2.1, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Electronic & Information Sciences, 2.1 at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (15)
ruby-rails10
rails10
group-policy10
policies10
ruby10
db-schema9
database-schema9
schema9
database-design9
access-control9
schema-design9
activerecord9
datagovuk8
web-frontend7
frontend7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
alphagov/whitehall
Sep 2011 - Nov 2012
Publishes government content on GOV.UK
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:30 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:James focused on implementing and improving backend functionality related to policy publishing within the Whitehall repository. They made changes to ensure that departmental editors could only publish policies they had viewed, addressing access control and data integrity concerns. These changes involved modifications to controllers, models, and step definitions, as well as database schema updates. Furthermore, the user refactored the system to handle versioning conflicts gracefully, making it easier for editors to merge changes.
govgovuk-publishing-frontendgovukgovernmentcontainer
alphagov/search-api
Jan 2012 - Jan 2012
Search API for GOV.UK
Contributions:5 commits in 1 day
search-apigovuk
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