James Dawson

A complete rebuild of a grocery store website in React and Next.js, replacing out-of-the-box solutions for their storefront, blogs, and advertising with a unified build.

As the lead front-end architect I estimated and planned new features, set coding standards, and mentored and reviewed code for over 20 developers.

This project is a career highlight. Several developers told me I was the best boss they'd ever had. The collaboration between our team and the client's was wholesome and imbued with mutual respect. I deeply enjoyed working with them.

Razorfish’s marketing website, featuring case studies, services, company information, and articles. Built to be beautiful, easy to maintain, and blazing fast.

I was honored to be chosen to architect and develop the face of our brand. I hand-coded the initial experience and oversaw maintenance of it for the duration of my time at Razorfish.

Technical best practices are in place at every level of the experience, including adaptive bitrate streaming on videos, context-optimized responsive images with automatic webp support, attentiveness to accessibility, and a continuous integration workflow that makes launching our pages easy and predictable.

Multi-step form flow that aims to determine a customer’s perfect TV based primarily on their passions and where they expect to place it.

Architected and led a small team to navigate ever-changing client needs and a continuously evolving design.

Beautifully rendered animations and a few unique form controls tend to steal the show here, but I'm most proud of the intricate logic of the form. The form knows the TVs through and through, and automatically disables controls that would lead to zero matches before the user can ever encounter an error state.

Web application used to manage and automate workflows for visual FX processes for movie and television productions.

Led a small engineering team to build the UI and worked with the client’s engineers to define the APIs necessary to power the application.

It’s hard to choose between being excited for the sheer number of functional integrations we hooked up in such a short amount of time, or how nice it was to implement a container-query solution for handling responsive UI elements in situations with dynamic sidebars, or the absolute delight of their CEO when we first demonstrated the project.

Credit card payment and management portal with custom themes for 20+ retailers including The Home Depot and Best Buy.

I focused on accessibility, assessing and refactoring our team’s code to meet WCAG 2.0 AA compliance. After establishing solid fundamentals throughout the project, I shifted to handling development of the most challenging defects and sophisticated components the project had to offer.

The sheer scale of the project. We worked on this for 3 years, at times with over 20 front-end developers on the team, and launched substantial updates every six months.