James Eagle

Tech Lead and Software Engineer

About Me

I have 7 years experience as a professional full stack web developer, the last 2 of which have been as the Tech Lead for a developer group of 18. I like to stay close to the code and lead by example, I work hard to maintain my own technical competence and contributions. At the same time I’m passionate about empowering my team to achieve their own goals and setting them up for success by providing them structure, mentorship and the right tools for the job.

I love solving problems and I love building things - in-code or in the real world, especially when it requires a trip to the hardware store. As an Australian now living in Denmark I have severe beach withdrawals but I am slowly acclimatising to the ice water.

Experience

Visit Group

Tech Lead

June 2021 - Present

visit.com

Tech lead and exploratory engineer for Citybreak

Tech lead and senior engineer for Citybreak, a Central Reservation System for Visit Group - a tourism e-commerce platform. As tech lead, I am responsible for setting the technical roadmap of the platform and various products as well as helping guide product development. I work with 3 teams - currently 18 engineers.
Day to day, I work on architectural improvement, tooling, observability and supporting the safe modernisation of our venerable (20+ yrs and counting) and battle-tested core as well as grinding the more challenging engineering tasks.
Highlights:

  • Overseeing the migration of 100+ projects .NetFramework to .Net (Core)
  • Reworking and modernising our external integration tech to target multiple partners and sister companies
  • Improving our offering of white label stores, back office apps and API based solutions to clients ranging from hotel chains and ski resorts to ferry companies and theme parks
  • Supported migration to Vue 3 from JQuery for our white label search and basket all-in-one client
  • Hitting strict SLA targets while processing traffic that supports ~300M USD in transactions
  • Increasing the observability and reliability of the platform with modern standards such as OpenTelemetry and increasing Unit and Integration test coverage

    Tech:
    .NET Framework .NET Core C# JavaScript Vue.js TypeScript RabbitMQ Open Telemetry Redis MongoDB Elasticsearch Azure DevOps Octopus Deploy SQL Server VMWare

Visit Group

Software Engineer

October 2016 - 2021

visit.com

Junior -> Senior at Visit

After a career change, I started in the Citybreak business unit at Visit as a junior in 2016.
For the next few years I worked across our whole tech stack: .Net Framework & Core backend services, various combos of Asp.Net, Vue.Js and JQuery solutions for widgets, white-label front-end solutions and back office tools.
Maintained SQL Server, Redis, Mongo, Elastic Search installations among others.
After a few years I became a de-facto lead of our core team. Along the way I pioneered a number of new services and tools, in particular those targeting external integrations
Managing basic dev-ops for the on-prem setup was also an important part of the role

Assorted

Various jobs in media and events

1999 - 2013

Before my career change to software development I worked numerous jobs in event and video production back in Australia. I also kick started my working life as a projectionist at the local multiplex
If you have any questions about this early direction (in which I picked up many useful skills and a couple of esoteric ones like how you digitised archival film back in the early 2000s), please ask!

Education

Gothenburg University

BSc Software Engineering and Management

2013 - 2016

A collaboration between GU and Chalmers University.
The bachelor has a practical, group-project based curriculum focused on designing and implementing software systems in a systematic fashion with quantifiable outcomes.
Also completed 3/4 of a Masters in Applied Data Science with Gothenburg University
Tech:
Erlang C++ Haskell Java Python Tensorflow

University of Canberra

BA Communications

2003 - 2005

Focused on Television Production and Marketing