James Read

James Read is the CTO at Music Gateway, a SAAS platform in the music industry. James joined in early 2017 as a Full Stack Developer and was promoted to CTO in 2019. James has introduced and improved project, efficiency and quality assurance with best practices and agile project management workflows, including Sprints, Kanban and daily stand-ups. This foundation was invaluable when they transitioned to working remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. James is responsible for recruiting developers and designers, creating motivated happy teams and mentoring. James has vastly improved testability, scalability, and resilience of core high-risk legacy systems. James has planned and implemented the migration to new microservices and mission-critical APIs. Designed and developed delivery mechanisms between Music Gateway and partners like, Spotify, Amazon Music, iTunes, Deezer, BPI, AWIN and others. Achievements Music Gateway include: Evaluation of legacy applications for risk and resilience, creating documentation, creating a patching process, automated backups & disaster recovery process. Creating a migration and product roadmap for retiring legacy applications, replaced with modern frameworks like Laravel and Vue. Delivering the new marketing website, technical SEO strategy, migration scripts for content from a legacy blog app’ to WordPress REST API for the blog and content management, development of the home page and key templates. Developing a Python & SQS Dockerized microservice to allow users to upload files for audio mastering. Delivering the new application infrastructure, Laravel API backend & Vue JS frontend, including user migration workflows and integrations with legacy applications. Delivering a DSP product, to allow users to send their music to streaming & download services like Spotify, Amazon Music and iTunes.