👋 About Me

My name is James Lawler and I am a full stack software developer. I currently focus on the JavaScript 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

• System Design using the RADIO structure
• Why I rewrote my blog into 11ty
• Private Repository to Build and Deploy Ghost Blog

See all articles.

⛏️ Things I've Done

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 and podcast. 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.