Woodbridge High School, London

Penwith College

Technical Director at dxw

* Executive director, sitting on the company board of a >£10m turnover, 120 employees, employee-owned agency working exclusively with the public sector and public good
* Shared operational responsibility for the business unit representing the majority of business revenue, supplying multidisciplinary agile software development teams to build vital public services
* Sole operational responsibility for the software development and technical operations teams

Some achievements:
* Writing the business plan and implementing the doubling of the size of the company and my teams
* Hiring internally and externally for my leadership team, and promoting and supporting the development of new line managers within the development team
* Key in winning >£10m worth of new work, with more work won as follow-on
* Tripling the profit of the areas I was responsible for

Technical Director

* Helping dxw communicate the story of our work, what we do and how we do it to help us maintain our status as leading technology voices in our industry
* Understanding and setting technical direction for dxw 
* Senior technical leadership supporting our clients and delivery teams (probably in the role as technical architect or account manager on projects)
* Supporting and growing existing tech leadership and establishing clear succession plans and career paths for team members. Working with the technology leadership team and the exec team to help us shape future senior roles in the tech team.
* Helping to raise the profile of individuals in the tech team so they develop and share their views and voice inside and outside of dxw

Technical Principal

I worked with Citizens Advice on re-shaping their in-house technology team, combining a traditional IT organisation with software development embedded in service delivery teams.

This included strategy work, organisational design and recruitment.

I left with the technology team successfully transitioned to a new directorship, increased trust among teams and a more stable strategic future.

Citizens Advice

Digital Transformation Consultant

Working closely with subject matter experts and council staff, we developed a process and software that spans the affordable housing process from ‘agreed’ to ‘built’ and beyond.

The project won the "Excellence in Tech" award at the 2020 RTPI Awards for Planning Excellence.

Read more about it at https://www.southwark.gov.uk/innovate/collabrative-project/affordable-housing-monitoring
Code at https://github.com/dxw/affordable-housing-monitoring

Southwark Council

Technical Lead / Product Strategy

Working with dxw, I helped bring the 'Report management information' service into production.

This business-critical service made it easy for thousands of suppliers to report on what work they had done through CCS' frameworks, and therefore enable CCS to automatically and accurately invoice them with their accountancy software.

Code available at https://github.com/Crown-Commercial-Service/DataSubmissionServiceAPI

Crown Commercial Service

Technical Lead

Working with dxw, I led on the technical aspect of bringing the 'Report a Repair' service into public Beta, as well as working on a discovery of how to improve the backend software for call centre staff.

Code available here: https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/maintain-my-home

I also advised on Hackney's API first strategy.

London Borough Of Hackney Council

A 10-week contract to work on some technical debt that had developed in Geckoboard's micro-application architecture. I refactored how widget sizes were stored throughout the system, allowing a new drag-and-drop interface to be developed. This was done with 0 downtime.

Geckoboard

Software Engineer

I met Ben Pollard, an Alinsky trained community organiser, who had been doing great work with organising Syrian refugees to settle into their new communities and build their own power.

I attended a few of the meetings, and together, over around 50 meetings, we iterated the format until we had something we believed could digitally scale. You can read about some of that process at https://blog.local-welcome.org/we-wrote-in-our-previous-blog-post-about-how-we-arrived-at-cooking-as-our-puzzle-for-attendees-to-a64ec82a50f6

Once we had that, we began the process of fundraising to build a digital team.

Local Welcome

Co Director

I was asked by newly-elected Deputy Leader Tom Watson to join a new digital transformation team within Labour HQ. I was part of a discovery team, exploring and mapping the existing systems and processes, and running user research sessions with members, volunteers and staff.

We then implemented a new API on the membership system, enabling a oAuth based single sign on system to allow smaller applications to be built on top of membership.

Labour Party

Technical Architect

UK Ministry of Justice

Deputy Head of Development

Senior Developer, most of my time here was spent covering a paternity leave as Technical Lead during the last 2 months of the transition of all agencies and arms-length bodies onto the GOV.UK platform.

Government Digital Service

Technical Lead/Developer, GOV.UK

Having marvelled at many of my friends continue the great work of improving government IT at the Government Digital Services, an opportunity arose to be the first arrival at an initiative to build the first similar team within a government department. From a team of around 10 civil servants, MOJ Digital Services is now 130 person strong. I helped introduce agile teams, continuous integration and hiring top class developers into what was once a very corporate and risk adverse institution.

After leaving BERG, I did some freelance work for some friends, including some work for Google Creative Labs in New York.

Freelance

Creative Technologist

In 2010 I contracted with BERG to build a magazine publishing platform in 6 weeks to coincide with the first iPad launch. That project went on to be a successful business[http://www.magplus.com/] and received a special mention from Steve Jobs[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na0q83kgtNQ]. You can read more about the project at http://berglondon.com/projects/magplus/

I enjoyed my time there immensely, and when asked to join BERG as a full time employee I jumped at the opportunity. During my time there I worked on many client projects (unfortunately NDAs stop me from mentioning who), but the majority of my time was spent working as lead developer of what would become the BERG Cloud[http://bergcloud.com/] platform, from which Little Printer[http://littleprinter.com/] would be controlled from. This included close work with the world class design team to create the mobile first web interface, down to printout rendering, queuing and delivery API design.

BERG

Whilst working as a senior developer at Unboxed Consulting I worked in Agile teams to deliver software for clients such as Maquet, Channel 5, V inspired, Audi and Britvic. We also provided Agile training.

Unboxed Consulting

After attending the first Barcamp for the UK Government, I ran a hack day in the Guardian offices to help demonstrate the power and benefits of opening up public data in machine-readable formats. 

After a very successful event, me and 2 partners founded Rewired State to continue the good work. We ran many hack days and provided consulting to the UK Government.

Highlights included being mentioned in a speech by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and watching the enthusiasm behind these events feed into the founding of GDS and GOV.UK

Rewired State

Director

Whilst working at Citysafe, I was headhunted to work on a startup project by Ged Day (Warp Films and bleep.com founder) and Dan Webb (now engineering manager of Twitter's web platform team). We created a social platform for sharing and selling music. We built it but unfortunately there's not a lot of money in selling MP3s.

People's Music Store

At my first full time position, I worked as a junior full stack developer in a small team building web based business continuity software for both the private (e.g. Burberry) and public (Westminster Council and Metropolitan police) sectors. This software was used for both training for and use in disaster situations varying from terrorist attacks to power outages.

James Darling