James Smith
Advisor at Gradual
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarJames Smith is an experienced product and engineering leader with 16 years building developer-focused tools, currently advising startups including Gradual and investing in companies like Linear and DX from San Francisco. As former CEO and co-founder of Bugsnag and now SVP of Products at SmartBear, he blends entrepreneurial instincts with hands-on engineering to scale products, teams, and observability infrastructure. He has deep mobile and backend chops—authoring and maintaining key Bugsnag SDKs for Android, Ruby, and Laravel—and a track record of improving robustness in libraries like android-async-http. An active open-source maintainer (loopj) whose projects are used by Twitter, Pinterest and Trello, he pairs practical low-level work (embedded RF/I2C contributions) with product strategy. Colleagues describe him as equally comfortable shipping SDK internals or shaping product roadmaps, and he often surfaces non-obvious reliability fixes that prevent production incidents.
17 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
1,607reputation
185kreached
14answers
3questions
gradle
top-5%
Github Skills (62)
asynchronous10
debugging10
error-reporting10
caching10
bugzilla10
javascript10
c-language10
exceptions10
jquery10
bug-tracker10
async10
laravel-mix10
plugin-development10
http10
android-sdk10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
loopj/android-smart-image-view
Mar 2011 - May 2018
Android ImageView replacement which allows image loading from URLs or contact address book, with caching
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:37 commits, 4 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 3 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on developing features for an Android image loading library. Their contributions included implementing a caching mechanism for images retrieved from URLs and contact address books, ensuring efficient retrieval and reducing network overhead. They also refactored code to address context leaks within image loading tasks and added functionalities to delete images from cache. Additionally, the user added helper functions and enhanced the image loading tasks by allowing for cancellation.
android-imageviewcachingimage-loading
loopj/jquery-tokeninput
Jul 2009 - May 2018
jQuery plugin which allows your users to select multiple items from a predefined list
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:242 commits, 1 PR, 12 pushes in 9 years
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on the development and enhancement of the "jquery-tokeninput" plugin. Their contributions include implementing new features such as free tagging, handling various key events, and enabling the ability to pre-populate the input field. Moreover, they addressed bugs and provided fixes related to the display, functionality, and styling of the plugin. Finally, the user improved the plugin by adding the ability to customize various text labels and integrating responsive input box resizing.
jquery-plugin
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