🦝 Jim O'Brien

Jim O'Brien has over 13 years of experience in the software industry. 🦝 Jim began their career in 2007 as a Software Developer at Business Web Software (BWS), where they worked on fixing bugs and developing new features using a combination of ASP.net and BWS' proprietary programming language. In 2011, they rejoined BWS (now Firmstep Ltd.) as a Software Developer and rose to a team lead position. During their time there, their team migrated a large application from Firmstep's old proprietary language to a PHP backend driving a vanilla JS SPA. In 2014, they joined Lens.io as a Senior Node.js Developer, where they were part of a team of 3 developers responsible for the entire application. 🦝 Jim worked on a variety of applications at Qubit Digital from 2016-2018, nearly all based on node.js microservices, with React/Redux on the frontend. In 2018, they joined Constructor Labs as a JavaScript Instructor, where they ran lectures and classes on JS, React, Redux, Node and Postgres. 🦝 Jim also provided students with support to help them understand challenging material and overcome difficulties. From 2016-2018, Jim worked at Mudano as a Technical Architect and Senior Software Engineer. As a Technical Architect, they led and oversaw technical architecture decision making, interviewed and assessed many engineering candidates, and launched and lead an internal training program for QA engineers to improve their JS skills. As a Senior Software Engineer, they planned and put into action a complete rewrite of their flagship product, from Angular 1.x to React, along with re-architecting the existing node.js backend. Finally, Jim worked as a Lead Web Engineer at Mettle from 2018-2022, where they developed and maintained a variety of web applications and associated libraries, was responsible for all web-focused technical decisions as the on/off web chapter lead, and pushed to up-skill those around him. 🦝 Jim is currently a Lead Web Engineer at KSOC.

Jim O'Brien attended Imperial College London from 2008 to 2012, where they earned a MEng in Computing. Prior to that, they attended Aylesbury Grammar School from 2000 to 2007.