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Kia ora, I'm James Toohey.

Software Engineer at Twilio, from New Zealand馃嚦馃嚳

About MeGet in touch

01

About

I'm a senior software engineer at Twilio, based in London and originally from New Zealand. I work on frontend platform, building the tools and foundations that help teams ship.

What I care about

Developer experience

Clear conventions and tooling, so the right way to build is also the easiest way.

Shipping safely

Every change tested and rolled out gradually, with a quick way back if something goes wrong.

Automation

Automating the repetitive parts, so people can focus on the work that matters.

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Tech stacks

Frontend

  • TypeScript

    My main language day to day, across product code, platform tooling and the pipelines that ship it.

  • React

    Where I started, back in a 2018 internship at Vista. I've built apps and component libraries with it, and React components were my first work at Twilio.

  • JavaScript

    Underneath everything on the frontend, and still the glue in plenty of build and pipeline tooling.

Platform

  • Buildkite

    The CI/CD pipelines product engineers at Twilio ship through: PR validation, deploys to staging and gradual production rollouts they can cancel or roll back.

  • Playwright

    End-to-end tests that teams write for their own features, run against every change in PRs and again in staging before it reaches production.

  • AWS

    S3, IAM, secrets storage and EC2 images for storing and deploying build artifacts and services.

Backend

  • Java

    The backend services I worked on at Twilio from 2023 to 2024, and something I expect to come back to.

  • Docker

    Containers for backend services, and for running end-to-end test suites in our pipelines.

  • Kubernetes

    Running those containers in pods, for services and for orchestrating test runs.

Earlier: React Native 路 Swift 路 Ionic 路 C# 路 .NET 路 SQL

03

Earlier projects

  • Archie's Pizzeria

    Archie's Pizzeria

    A website I built for a local pizzeria during New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown, putting their menu online. It became their main website.

    React 路 TypeScript 路 Sass

  • Lumos Mobile

    Lumos Mobile

    Vista's mobile app for moviegoers to buy tickets and concessions and manage their loyalty accounts. I played a key role in building it.

    React 路 Ionic 路 TypeScript

04

Let's talk

Got a question about my projects? Want to hear more about me? I'd love to have a chat. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or send an email!