James Ward
Motion Designer at James Ward
Crested Butte, Colorado, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Ward is a UK-born motion designer and visual artist with 17 years of creative and technical experience, currently based in Crested Butte, Colorado. He combines a minimalist, process-driven approach to motion, animation and GIF art with a strong background in creative direction and running a studio that served clients like Vodafone, BBC and Investec. Parallel to his visual work, James has substantial hands-on engineering experience—contributing to well-known open-source projects such as Dropwizard, Play Framework and grpc-kotlin—bringing skills in backend, build automation and performance-focused caching. This blend of artistic sensibility and engineering savvy lets him translate complex stories into clear, well-engineered motion work and technical examples. He values listening, attention to detail and elegant simplicity, and has been recognized as a featured digital artist on platforms like Ello and Tumblr.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BA Hons, Television and Video Production, BA Hons, Television and Video Production at Bournemouth University
Stackoverflow
29,393reputation
1.6mreached
571answers
8questions
rest
top-5%
heroku
top-1%
apache-flex
top-1%
routes
top-5%
sbt
top-5%
scala
top-5%
Github Skills (45)
kotlin10
asynchronous10
gradle10
caching10
scripting10
async10
guava10
http-header10
java10
scala10
javas10
script10
apache-flex10
build-automation10
heroku10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
grpc/grpc-kotlin
Apr 2020 - Jul 2022
Kotlin gRPC implementation. HTTP/2 based RPC
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 95 reviews, 51 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:James's primary contribution involved refactoring and modernizing the examples within the Kotlin gRPC implementation. They focused on cleanup and improved the example code, switching to use Kotlin idioms and asynchronous operations. The user also migrated the build process to kts, and implemented a GraalVM native image example and performed version bumps.
grpckotlinrpc
playframework/playframework
Feb 2012 - Feb 2017
The Community Maintained High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits, 2 PRs, 19 comments in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to back-end functionality and database interactions within the Play Framework. Their work includes enhancing database connection support for various database types by modifying configuration settings and SQL queries. The user also made improvements to the framework's handling of database evolution and responses, ensuring errors are properly logged and fixing an issue related to caching. Furthermore, they refactored code for cleaner formatting and improved code organization.
javascalaweb-frameworkreactiverestful
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