Jim Purbrick
Advisor at ZENOS
Brighton, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJim Purbrick is an experienced software leader and engineer with 14 years of industry experience building large-scale virtual environments, social VR platforms and game networking systems. He has led teams and studios—founding Linden Lab’s Brighton office and scaling Oculus/Facebook London engineering from a few engineers to multi-hundred-person organisations—while contributing hands-on to products like Oculus Rooms, Venues and MASSIVE-3. Technically versatile, Jim has delivered core infrastructure and tooling work across build systems (notably performance and daemon improvements to Facebook’s Buck), real-time server stacks for Warhammer Online and Second Life, and pioneering VR integrations such as the EVE Online–Dust 514 API bridge. He combines deep research credentials (PhD in Computer Science) with practical engineering, shipping production-ready micro-threading, networking and DevOps solutions. Known for blending product strategy with low-level optimisation, he advises startups on technical direction while remaining active in open-source performance and tooling projects.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of Nottingham
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
jython10
caching10
javascript10
middleware10
multithreading10
jes10
build-system10
redux10
java10
javas10
jestjs10
performance-optimization10
jtest10
state-management10
replication10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
facebookarchive/nailgun
Jul 2013 - Jul 2017
Nailgun is a client, protocol, and server for running Java programs from the command line without incurring the JVM startup overhead.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 19 PRs, 19 pushes in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the `nailgun-server` component, enhancing its functionality. They added support for features such as client heartbeat monitoring, new APIs, and client disconnection detection. They also refactored and improved the input stream processing, including changes to thread synchronization and handling of chunk payloads. These changes improved stability and client-server communication.
java-programsoverheadjvmprogramsjar
facebook/buck
May 2013 - Aug 2014
A fast build system that encourages the creation of small, reusable modules over a variety of platforms and languages.
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:78 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the build system, enhancing its performance and maintainability. They focused on optimizing build file parsing by integrating Jython and removing dependencies on system Python. Their work involved refactoring the build file parser and improving cache invalidation by tracking file dependencies and environment changes. The user also implemented features such as the Buck daemon and improvements to the file watcher to further improve performance.
buckpythonplatformsandroidlanguages
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