James Andrews
I’ve been building web applications since 1996, playing music since the eighties, and taking photographs since the mid-2000s.
Mostly self-taught. It’s been the same habit every time — get curious, build the thing badly, keep at it until it isn’t bad.
Work
Two platform generations at Openbridge.
I joined pre-product in 2013 and built the first version of the SaaS application on my own — a Symfony API behind an Angular front end, nothing to production. Architecture, implementation, the third-party integrations, and the Linux and AWS underneath it.
In 2020 we replaced it. Different stack, same domain: I was the primary front-end engineer on the new application and carried the business logic across, walking the developer writing the Python API through the rules and the reasoning already baked into the old system. Two builds, two stacks, one product.
The front end I stood up on Angular 8 runs on Angular 21 today, upgraded the whole way rather than left to rot. Currently building the CLI that lets customers point their AI agents at the API.
openbridge.com →Before this: Perl CGI on a regional ISP’s shared servers, agency work for L.L. Bean, Neiman Marcus, FedEx and General Motors, e-commerce for a consumer audio retailer, and a charitable giving platform I co-founded. Long enough to have watched several approaches arrive, win, and quietly stop being mentioned.
The long version — full CV →- Built v1
- Symfony API, Angular front end, solo
- Rebuild
- Python on Lambda, Angular 8 → 21
- Also shipped
- Stripe billing, OAuth connection management, the move to Auth0
Tools
Things I built for myself.
Circle of Fifths
Pick a key, hear its seven chords, see how each one functions. The wheel isn’t decoration — your I, IV and V sit next to each other on it, which is why three chords carry most songs.
String Tuner
Tap a string, hear its pitch, tune to it. No microphone and nothing to install, so it still works in a loud room — which is where pitch detection tends to give up.
Bread Helper
Baker’s percentages, pizza dough ball weights and pan volumes. Set the flour weight or the dough weight and it solves the rest, so a recipe scales to whatever tin you actually own.
Photography
The other thing nobody taught me.
James Andrews Photography
What’s online so far is a fraction of it — the rest is still sitting on a drive waiting for me to get to it.
Bread
The one thing somebody actually taught me.
I started taking classes at ABC Cooking Studio here in Japan in 2018, and in 2021 I passed the license exams — practical and written, in Japanese. That came with a small plaque with my name on it, and technically means I could teach there. I don’t. I still take classes though, and there’s usually one on the calendar — new recipes, mostly. I just want to keep getting better at it.
Get in touch
If you want something built, or you use one of the tools and something about it is wrong, I want to hear it.
me@jamesmandrews.com