👋 About Me

My name is James Lawler and I am a full stack software developer. I currently focus on the JavaScript/.NET tech stack and micro-service architecture. This is my personal website which I use to keep track of things I have done over time and write down my notes on various topics. It is easy to lose track of what you have learnt and accomplished, and this site will be a record of my time as a developer.

🖊️ Recent articles

• Cloudflare Developer Platform experiences
• How I created a daily game
• System Design using the RADIO structure

See all articles.

⛏️ Things I've Done

June 2025

• Developed a meal planner to better plan my weekly shopping and reduce my food waste. This project is built on top of Cloudflare Developer Platform and makes use of their serverless D1 Database.

February 2025

• Developed a web-based daily game to help practice Portuguese vocabulary genders. The game is built using NextJs, TailwindCSS, and some simple client-side game logic written in JavaScript.

September 2024

• Converted my domain jameslawler.com from a self hosted Ghost instance to an 11ty static web site using TailwindCSS.

August 2024

• Published my first physical book as a collaboration with my wife. The book is a 200 page book to help students of the Portuguese language practice the most common verbs.

March 2022

• Created a Raspberry Pi based infrastructure project to keep a redundant offline backup of my Internet "life".

May 2018

• Launched Portuguese from Portugal website. A website with listening and reading material for students of the Portuguese language.

September 2014

• Senior Developer and team lead for large Germany IT company.

January 2012

• IT consultant in London.

April 2011

• 6-month solo adventure from overland using only buses, trains, and cars to travel half way around the world.

April 2010

• Bought my personal domain jameslawler.com

August 2007

• Published Screenlets widget called WhatsOnTV which could parse XMLTV format and render a simple TV Guide. I found a website from kde where someone saved the widget. It has a nice simple screenshot which shows how it looked.

2006

• Graduated university with a Bachelor degree in Information Technology.

2004

• Started my first professional IT job working in VB.Net on web applications for a federal government office.

2003

• Received a DVB-T tuner card for my computer and spent a lot of time learning and writing code for Microsoft DirectX to be able to receive the DVB-T data, analyse it, and place timestamp markers at the TV commercials.

2001

• Built my first PC after saving money earned from an after school job.

2000

• Started to learn to write VB6 and Java code.
• Created a small program that could recursively crawl a website to look for dead links.

1998

• First steps into creating projects on the Internet by learning HTML / CSS / CGI
• Published my first 90s styled website on Angelfire.com. I've searched for it on archive.org but have never been able to find it again.