My name is James Simpson. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, from English teaching, to journalism, asbestos analysis and running an online store. But when I turned 30 just days after my father’s death, I realised that none of these things were what I really wanted to do as a career.

I had learned a bit of Ruby at that point, and I was using it to solve a problem. How do you serve a dynamic-seeming storefront on a domain that will not allow custom Javascript to run and operated with iframes when you left the front page – all with no inherent access to the database of products maintained by the site. My answer was a hourly cron job that ran a Ruby script that scraped from the host service’s product and store APIs, collated the data into rows of products and interspersed user-defined banner data that can be easily changed as CSV files. The outcome was a storefront that changed each hour to present top ranking products, new reviews, updated category pages and more.

That was my introduction to the power of programming. Since then I have completed Harvard University’s CS50 course, creating a movie recommendation site based on the TMDb API, and have been working on a laboratory information management system in my day job.

This blog will be a place to discuss challenges and solutions, new and ongoing projects, and my efforts towards finding a career in backend development.