Looking for a dynamic and trustworthy speaker for your next tech event?
Moresta! My name is James and I am a Senior Software Developer at Futurice (a top Finnish consultancy) and I would love to create an entertaining and educational talk or workshop for your next event.
I have been honing my craft speaking at local events across Finland, the global Futurice Learning Festival, open source events such as Docs Thursday.
I have spoken at 2 large scale events (TEDxPSU and HTML5Dev Conference in San Francisco) so I know the level of polish, practice and professionalism that comes with speaking at a large event.
I am currently looking to book talks that are a reasonable traveling distance to my home base in Helsinki, Finland. I am a native English speaker and also speak basic Finnish, French, and Russian.
possible topics for your next event
Design Systems in React
Desktop React Apps with Electron
React Components for Designers
What People are Saying About James
James was a guest on the Freelancers show and we had a great conversation about what can go wrong with Designers and Developers when they are just tossed in the same room. James had some great insight into why the Mars / Venus issue exists and how to survive the project when both teams have to work together to accomplish the same goals.
Co-host of Freelancers Show
James is a regular speaker in Turku <3 Frontend events and we're always excited to have him speak in our events. His technical understanding of design systems combined with a very easy-to-approach style of speaking helps us provide great value to the members of our frontend developer community. With James, I never have to worry about a lack of preparation or quality as his talks are always well done.
Organizer, Turku <3 Frontend
We had a captivating conversation with James on a wide array of topics in the design and development landscape. We talked about James's voluminous contributions to the ZURB Foundation framework and his role as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State.Our audience genuinely appreciated James for being so open to sharing his knowledge and for so many actionable takeaways. Upon receiving such brilliant feedback from our viewers and increasing subscribers, we asked James back on the show for our next season as we are committed to providing the highest quality show that we can, with the best guests we can think of.
Co-host of Thundernerds Podcast
100% prepared and just a real delight
We had James as a guest on The Freelancers' Show and he was a standout guest because of his ability to combine deep knowledge on his topic with a fun, conversational style. He was 100% prepared and just a real delight as a guest.
Co-host of Freelancers Show
Examples of Past Talks
Video coming soon...
Component Driven Development with Cypress.io
James recently returned from React Finland and attended a day-long workshop on Design Systems with React presented by Andrey Okonetchnikov and Artem Sapegin (the creator of React Styleguidist). With that knowledge, today he will add Cypress.io (a cool new e2e testing toolchain) to the mix and advocate creating small behavior based tests at the component level (as opposed to or in addition to the application level) as a way to build developer confidence in a design system or component library built with React (or anything really).
Workshop Storefront
In the talk James will discuss his recent research and exploration of React and TypeScript tooling for building and developing design systems. He will also be sharing a starter pack that you can start playing with these technologies right away. Storybook, Syleguidist, and Styled Components will be discussed.
Build Your Own Bootstrap
In the talk I discuss what living styleguides are, why you should learn build your own bootstrap, and how to use ZURB Style Sherpa as a tool to kickoff that process. SLIDES
Easy Bolt-on Docs Using React Styleguidist
The talk will explain both the process and provide code examples on how to bootstrap your latest project in the least disruptive way. An example of expanding a publicly available project in several phases will be given (along with the source). At the end you will learn what you can get for free, what are some low hanging fruit, and then where to concentrate your efforts as you scale. If you have an interest in creating a UI Component library or Design System this is a great precursor and first step for your project. SLIDES