James Smith
Principal Web Developer at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
South Cambridgeshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Smith is a Principal Web Developer with nearly 30 years working across full-stack web technologies, currently leading large-scale scientific web infrastructure at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He blends deep server-side expertise in Perl, PHP and SQL with client-side skills in JavaScript, jQuery, CSS and SVG, and runs security and operations for hundreds of production and development hosts. Trained as an academic statistician (PhD, Durham), he brings strong analytic and data-visualisation instincts to bioinformatics, e‑commerce and survey systems, and has built bespoke frameworks like the open-source Pagesmith mod_perl suite. A long-term contributor to algorithmic programming projects on GitHub, he applies rigorous problem diagnosis and optimisation to both number-theory coding and HTML reporting. Known for pragmatic project leadership and conservational UX/IA choices, he also maintains a hard line on unsolicited contacts and recruitment approaches.
24 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Statistics, PhD Statistics at Durham University
Github Skills (3)
number-theory10
perl10
algorithms10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
manwar/perlweeklychallenge-club
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
Knowledge base for The Weekly Challenge club members using Perl, Raku, Ada, APL, Awk, Bash, BASIC, Bc, Befunge-93, Bourne Shell, BQN, Brainfuck, C3, C, CESIL, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, Coconut, Crystal, D, Dart, Dc, Elm, Emacs Lisp, Erlang, Excel VBA, Fennel, Fish, Forth, Fortran, Gembase, GNAT, Go, Haskell, Haxe, HTML, Idris, IO, J, Janet, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Kotlin, Lisp, Lua, M4, Miranda, Modula 3, MMIX, Mumps, Myrddin, Nim, Nix, Node.js, Nuweb, OCaml, Odin, Ook, Pascal, PHP, Python, Postscript, Prolog, R, Ring, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Scheme, Sed, Smalltalk, SQL, Swift, Tcl, TypeScript, Visual BASIC, WebAssembly, Wolfram, XSLT and Zig.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 1363 commits, 250 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James has been actively involved in the development of a Perl-based project, focusing on solving problems related to number theory and combinatorial mathematics. The commits reveal a strong focus on implementing and optimizing algorithms for number theory problems. Furthermore, the user is involved in creating HTML-based reports with output.
nim-langknowledge-baseemacsmemberszig
drbaggy/perlweeklychallenge-club
Aug 2020 - Jan 2021
Knowledge base for The Weekly Challenge Club members. Supported languages are Perl, Raku, APL, Awk, Bash, C, C++, Clojure, Elm, Erlang, Go, Haskell, HTML, Idris, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Node, Python, Postscript, Prolog, R, Ruby, Rust, Swift and Tcl.
Contributions:35 pushes in 4 months
pythonawkelmknowledge-baseapl
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