James Ward
Director Of Engineering at Vidrovr
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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RockstarJames Ward is a Director of Engineering based in New York with 13 years of experience leading teams to build reliable, secure backend systems and shipping pragmatic product improvements. He blends hands-on engineering—contributions to open-source projects like TypeORM, redis-py-cluster, and the popular Vanilla forum—with leadership roles at startups and scale-ups including Vidrovr, HumanFirst, and Venmo. His technical strengths span database-driven systems, security hardening, and operational reliability, evidenced by work fixing command routing, improving JSON safety, and optimizing SQL queries. James is comfortable moving between game backend logic, infra libraries, and production services, a versatility reflected by projects from Goonstation game mechanics to a lightweight PagerDuty-like monitoring tool. Colleagues describe him as imaginative yet methodical: he pairs creative problem framing with meticulous refactors and tests to turn ambitious ideas into maintainable reality.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (57)
debugging10
url-routing10
ss10
network-configuration10
debug10
query-builder10
python10
redis10
beyond-compare10
mysql10
gameplay10
django10
testing10
typescript10
server-configuration10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
rmmh/skybot
Nov 2014 - May 2019
Python IRC bot
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:39 commits, 34 PRs, 39 comments in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James made multiple contributions to the Python IRC bot, Skybot, enhancing its functionality and maintaining its integration with various online services. They updated the `metacritic.py` plugin to scrape data from the updated website structure. Further contributions involved adding support for API keys in the `imdb.py` plugin and modifying the `cdecl.py` plugin to use a new API endpoint. Several unit tests were added to the plugins.
irc-botpythonbotpython3irc
typeorm/typeorm
Jul 2020 - Feb 2022
ORM for TypeScript and JavaScript. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAP Hana, WebSQL databases. Works in NodeJS, Browser, Ionic, Cordova and Electron platforms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 291 reviews, 190 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to TypeORM's back-end functionality, focusing on database interaction. They added support for composite join columns in EntitySchema, enhancing relational database mapping. Furthermore, they addressed issues related to parameter handling in the SqljsDriver and implemented features to support returning additional columns with MSSQL, showcasing expertise in database-specific query building and database interactions. The user also worked on handling Oracle connection strings.
sqlserverionic-cordovasap-hanahanaorm
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