James Ward
Director Of Engineering at Vidrovr
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarJames Ward is a Director of Engineering in New York with 12 years of experience leading backend teams at startups and fintechs including Vidrovr, Venmo, and Wayfair. He combines hands-on expertise in databases, Redis, and ORM/SQL tooling with a strong focus on security and reliability, and continues to ship code across languages and domains. An active open-source contributor, his work spans TypeORM and redis-py-cluster to the Vanilla forum and the Goonstation game backend, demonstrating comfort with both game mechanics and production infrastructure. A former co-founder and Recurse Center participant, he brings entrepreneurial grit, continual learning, and a pragmatic, slightly playful engineering culture to the teams he leads.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (69)
url-routing10
python10
testing10
server-configuration10
security10
db-schema10
game-development10
django210
schema10
network-configuration10
django10
schema-design10
redis-client10
playing10
sql10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
rmmh/skybot
Nov 2014 - May 2019
Python IRC bot
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:39 commits, 34 PRs, 39 comments in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James made multiple contributions to the Python IRC bot, Skybot, enhancing its functionality and maintaining its integration with various online services. They updated the `metacritic.py` plugin to scrape data from the updated website structure. Further contributions involved adding support for API keys in the `imdb.py` plugin and modifying the `cdecl.py` plugin to use a new API endpoint. Several unit tests were added to the plugins.
irc-botpythonbotpython3irc
typeorm/typeorm
Jul 2020 - Feb 2022
ORM for TypeScript and JavaScript. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAP Hana, WebSQL databases. Works in NodeJS, Browser, Ionic, Cordova and Electron platforms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 291 reviews, 190 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to TypeORM's back-end functionality, focusing on database interaction. They added support for composite join columns in EntitySchema, enhancing relational database mapping. Furthermore, they addressed issues related to parameter handling in the SqljsDriver and implemented features to support returning additional columns with MSSQL, showcasing expertise in database-specific query building and database interactions. The user also worked on handling Oracle connection strings.
sqlserverionic-cordovasap-hanahanaorm
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.