James Trew
Mechanical Engineer
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Trew is a mechanical engineer turned software-focused developer with six years of cross-disciplinary experience blending product development, aviation engineering, and full-stack tooling. Based in Old Toronto, he combines hands-on mechanical design (SolidWorks, CATIA) and project leadership with strong software skills—Python, SQL, VBA—and notable open-source contributions to Neovim and popular plugins like telescope.nvim and git-worktree.nvim. His work on git integration, Unicode support, and file-browser UX shows a pragmatic attention to developer workflows and edge-case robustness. Comfortable moving between hardware prototyping and backend/extension development, he brings a systems-minded approach to solving practical problems and improving tooling for other engineers. An early background in operations and hospitality informs his focus on process, documentation, and measurable improvements.
5 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
International Baccalaureate Diploma, International Baccalaureate Diploma at Osaka International School of Kwansei GakuinBachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Mechanical Engineering at University of Toronto
English, Japanese
Github Skills (20)
editors10
git10
file-management10
text-editor10
vimscript10
editor10
neovim10
lua10
telescope10
file-explorer10
code-editor10
nvim10
neovim-plugin10
user-interface9
language-server-protocol9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
nvim-telescope/telescope-file-browser.nvim
Jan 2022 - Dec 2022
File Browser extension for telescope.nvim
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:29 reviews, 15 commits, 129 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the file browser extension for Neovim. Their work involved bug fixes, such as correcting behavior related to the selection of parent and current directories. They also added new features, including an option to hide the parent directory entry. Additionally, the user addressed documentation issues and improved the file browser's integration with Neovim's functionality, ensuring correct path display and compatibility with external tools like netrw.
luafile-browservimbrowserfile-explorer
nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Find, Filter, Preview, Pick. All lua, all the time.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:125 reviews, 4 commits, 338 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the improvement of the Git integration, including the separation of commit date and time within Git branches and the addition of features to the built-in picker. They also addressed several bug fixes and enhancements, most notably, making adjustments to the `current_buffer_fuzzy_find` to prevent errors on selection and improving the support for unicode characters in filenames. The user also focused on refactoring and documentation improvements.
nvim-lualuapickneovimnvim
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