Charlotte, NC
Will James — a developer and marketing specialist with 5+ years building production interfaces in React, Vue, and Angular, plus a media-planning background buying ad spend for national brands. I love untangling complex problems, in a codebase or a campaign. Before code, it was the stage and the media plan — I ship the thing, and I know why it'll work.
A mix of client work and side builds — where I own the whole thing, design decisions included.
An interactive Rubik's Cube app built with a library-based solver and a 3D-rendered cube. Scrambles, solves, and steps through the solution, plus a manual play mode with drag-to-turn controls (with mobile touch support) for exploring the cube freely.
A webpage built to showcase books written by Northwestern alumni authors, along with information about each one. Built in Cascade CMS with vanilla JavaScript, using a CSV file as a lightweight stand-in for a database — with results that are searchable, filterable, and sortable.
A full redesign and rebuild of the University's Donor Honor Roll, entrusted to me by the Giving team as a key project for annual donor recognition. Built in Cascade CMS with vanilla JavaScript and a CSV file standing in as the data source, listing donors alongside their level of giving with a clarity and elegance meant to properly showcase supporters' generosity.
A redesign of the Homecoming and Reunion Weekend schedule, focused on usability for the team maintaining it as much as for the alumni reading it. Built in Cascade CMS with vanilla JavaScript and a CSV file as the data source, listing all weekend activity with results sortable and filterable by event type, and built so the schedule can be edited and updated swiftly during a weekend where timing changes fast.
A single-page site for an independent massage and holistic health practice, designed and built end to end — custom typography, a logo prepared and embedded directly in the page, and a working contact form wired up through Netlify Forms so the client gets inquiries straight to their inbox with no backend to maintain.
A set of tools built for Coca-Cola Bottling Consolidated's sales team to execute vendor contracts, replacing and upgrading the system the team had been using before. Built with Angular on the front end and a .NET back end.
A trivia game that pulls 10 multiple-choice questions at random from the Open Trivia Database's pool of over 100,000 questions, then grades the user's answers at the end of the round.
A solver that takes a Sudoku puzzle entered by the user and works out the completed grid.
Five-plus years across the modern front end, with the back-end and infrastructure range to see a project through end to end.
Three acts, one throughline: understand an audience, then build the thing that reaches them.
Trained to read a room in real time — pacing, tension, attention. It's the same instinct that now tells me when an interface is asking too much of someone.
Learned to work backward from an audience and a budget to a plan — and to defend that plan with data. Every product decision since has started from the same question: who is this for, actually?
As Associate Director of Digital Communications and Web Developer at Northwestern's Alumni Relations & Development department, and as a Full Stack Developer at Coca-Cola Bottling Consolidated, turned that instinct into shipped software — sites, tools, and systems used by real audiences at scale.
Two roles, two very different audiences — a university's alumni network and a national beverage manufacturer's internal teams.
Associate Director of Digital Communications & Web Developer
Owned digital communications and web development for Alumni Relations & Development — building and maintaining the sites and tools that keep a large, dispersed alumni community connected to the university.
Full Stack Developer
Built and maintained full-stack applications inside a large-scale manufacturing and distribution business, working across the front and back end to support internal systems and teams.
What I bring beyond the job titles.
Most developers can build what marketing asks for. Most marketers can brief what developers should build. I do both myself — which means fewer handoffs, fewer things lost in translation, and a faster path from idea to something live that actually performs.
I like the puzzle as much as the finished product — tracing a bug back through a system nobody fully understands anymore, or figuring out why a campaign's numbers don't add up. Different domains, same instinct: pull the thread until it makes sense.
Years of explaining technical things to non-technical people — first working IT in college, then at the Genius Bar, later across agency and client relationships — taught me how to make a decision legible to whoever has to sign off on it, without dumbing it down.
Open to contract and full-time web developer and/or digital marketing roles. If there's a fit, I'd like to hear about it.