James McFarland

I've loved building since I was young, starting off with the Lego Duplo sets, moving up through the fancier Technic ones, to today, where I build whatever I want.

I've been coding since I was 13 (it's not the flex I think it is, I know...), starting out attempting to make the greatest, fastest, highest performance browser the world had seen. It was called CodingTurtle Browser, was based on Internet Explorer 11 and used Windows Forms.

It sucked. badly.

I've came a long way, from building browsers to building experiences that run in them. I've built a lot of projects with TypeScript & Next.js (you'll find links to a few of them below, check them out!). My focus in engineering is solving the issue, and solving it well.

Ethos

I build with the Nike-like ethos of just build it. This means a few things which stay common amongst my work:

1. Rapid Iteration, and I mean rapid. Write it, test it, send it. Move fast. I'd take 30 small deploys over 3 large ones.

2. Outsource, re-use and rarely re-write. When building, I ask myself, "has this been built already?" Yes? Use it. No? Find the closet thing, re-use it. Yes but it's too slow/big/ugly? Re-write.

3. Make it pretty This one might seem a bit contray to the first point of Rapid Iteration, but no matter what I am working on I want it to look good to it's end users. User Experience matters, regardless.

These points are what I work off right now, but I always find myself changing and moving as I get exposure to new technologies, methodologies and other -ologies. I feel they are a strong platform to build on.

Experience

The fun professional bit

Tech

1. Modern web development Most of my personal work/projects are built on some combination of Next.js, Hono TailwindCSS, Drizzle ORM and tRPC I find this stack incredibly productive. This very site is built on Next.js and Tailwind. 2. Security My Final Year Project (FYP) was a SaaS platform for university societies to manage themselves on. A key aspect of this platform was the end-to-end encrypted password management system I designed and implemented. This required immersing myself into the world of browser security, cryptography and secure data storage.

2. Serverless Architecture The majority of my work through my internship was focused around building a highly scalable backend API for Liberty Mutual's Car Insurance lines. This API supports thousands of hits per day, and orchestrates a number of downstream services in order to provide a fast, robust and cost-effective experience for consumers. To do this, I worked with numerous AWS offerings, namely Lambdas, Step Functions and CloudFormation Templates, alongside tools like GraphQL, Redis, and Splunk

3. Desktop Development In University, and in secondary school, most of my time was spent developing desktop applications. I've built with both Java and C# extensively, utilisng JavaFX and XAML/WinUI respectively to build out the supporting GUIs for these apps.

Soft Experience

1. Queen's Computing Society (QCS) I joined QCS' committee in November 2021, since then I have immersed myself in the society and the team, leading on projects such as our Minecraft Server, which helped bring student together during our University lockdown, and our hugely successful annual EEECS Formal, from which I led the team in raising over £20,000 during my time I also sat on the Executive Committee for the 2022/23 and 2024/25 academic years as Secretary and Vice President, having a key role in day-to-day operations of the 400-member strong society, and helping bring our amazing team together to deliver for students! A large part of my work in the past 2 years has revolved around our technical systems, working on member management tooling, game authorisation systems and our internal security standing by deploying credential management solutions and access policies.

2. Queen's Porpulsion Lab (QPL) UKSEDS ORT 2025 Competition

   The Olympus Rover Trials (ORT) challenge student teams to design, construct and operate a rover for an analogue sample return mission to Mars. Students create a rover concept, trade off performance parameters and pass through a rigorous review process with a panel of engineers from the space sector.

   I joined QPL's team to build the software and control layer for their entry. I was responsible for designing and implenting video, telemetry and control links for the rover, with stringent requirements in range, operational resilience and performance. I successfully integrated my multi-architecture software solution with the mechinical and electrical teams, delivering a successful platform.

3. Volunteering I have also helped at a number of events, both in planning stages and on the day, such as ElevateNI 2023, a student-led conference, supported by QCS, and NIDC 2023, the "Event of the Year" for Northern Ireland's tech community

That's enough for the README. Let's see some code.

James.