James Padolsey
Founder at The Collective Intelligence Project
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Padolsey is a self-taught software engineer and founder with 17+ years building front-end and platform tooling at companies like Facebook, Twitter and Stripe, and author of Clean Code in JavaScript. After training as a paramedic and surviving a life-changing stroke, he now focuses on clinically-informed safety infrastructure for AI conversations—founding NOPE to detect and respond to disclosures of self-harm in chatbots. A founding engineer at the Collective Intelligence Project, he applies public-interest scrutiny to how AI represents the Global South. His long-running open-source work includes practical DOM and UI utilities (notably findAndReplaceDOMText and jQuery plugins) that reflect a pragmatic, browser-focused craftsmanship. Empathetic and multidisciplinary, he blends high-scale product experience with lived experience of crisis care to design safer AI interactions.
17 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Paramedic Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Paramedic Science at St George's, University of London (for students and alumni)
Stackoverflow
110,634reputation
18.8mreached
514answers
29questions
offset
top-5%
closures
top-5%
dom
top-1%
canvas
top-5%
regex
top-1%
animation
top-1%
Github Skills (49)
ajax10
node-module10
json10
javascript10
npm10
scroll10
url-parameters10
jquery10
animation10
testing10
plugin-development10
css10
linux10
regex10
regular-expression10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
padolsey/findAndReplaceDOMText
Jul 2012 - Dec 2017
:mag: Find and replace DOM text
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:48 commits, 11 PRs, 24 pushes in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the `findandreplacedomtext` library. Their contributions centered on refining the core functionality, including bug fixes and improving the behavior of the text replacement mechanism within the DOM. Furthermore, they expanded the testing suite to address edge cases and ensure broader compatibility across different browsers, particularly addressing inconsistencies in Internet Explorer. Additionally, the user implemented the ability for the custom replacement function to handle the inner text.
dom
padolsey-archive/prettyprint.js
Jun 2009 - Nov 2012
An in-browser JavaScript variable dumper, similar in functionality to ColdFusion's cfdump tag.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 1 comment in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on improving the `prettyprint.js` library, a JavaScript variable dumper. Their contributions involved fixing issues related to the display of canvas elements in different browsers. They also focused on enhancing code comments, removing redundancy, and improving the formatting of the output. Furthermore, the user added styling options and corrected version information.
coldfusionjavascript
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