James is another one of our very experienced developers and he is our multi-linguistic expert, although to be fair, he is a dab hand at most things Drupal. Go to him with your language-related questions or if you want to know anything about football, we're pretty sure he knows it all!

Which ComputerMinds office team are you part of?

It doesn't matter so much when we're all working from home, but I'd say I'm part of the best one ;-) (Coventry)

How long have you been working for ComputerMinds?

Over 10 years. My first week was at Drupalcon Paris 2009. That was a great way to start; being thrust straight into the ‘real’ Drupal world, rather than just seeing the community as a giant online forum. I made so many notes that week!

How do you travel to work?

Nowadays, I would simply walk upstairs after breakfast at home. But I also live close enough to the office that walking there has always been easy. In the time that it takes to have a stand-up, I've ran home & back to fetch random things like spanners (to fix bikes) and hammers (to put pictures up).

What is your favourite thing about working at ComputerMinds?

I have the genuine luxury of working with friends, who I actually know from outside work primarily. I never want to take that for granted.

What is your favourite thing to eat when at work?

Probably pizza - we have occasionally ordered some in for everyone in the office, I think using the excuse of team building or boosting morale.

Tea or Coffee?

Coffee.

What is an interesting fact about you?

Whilst I was still at school, I got invited to work during summer holidays as a tester for Championship Manager (now known as Football Manager) at Sports Interactive’s offices. I still vaguely wonder how my career might have been different if I’d have gone!

What Drupal projects/modules are you involved in?

I maintain Language Hierarchy and have previously helped out with maintaining the GDPR project for Drupal. There’s all sorts of minor projects that I’ve worked on over time, and I frequently contribute to patches or help in issues on Drupal core and all sorts of contributed modules, whether well-known or obscure. I’m often found sticking my nose into core Drupal issues about languages/translation and configuration management at the moment. I helped make Field Collection support translations, which might have been one of the longest-running issues I’ve ever seen in the Drupal community!

What's your favourite kind of Drupal work?

Some of my colleagues joke that I’m the man for tedious tasks, as my patience for them seems to be oddly high. Issues around language and translation fascinate me - I’ve written a series of articles around this. Since the arrival of Drupal 8, I’ve enjoyed delving into the ‘right way’ to do things with entities, AJAX, fields, plugins and the like. I’m passionate about trying to achieve, or even define, best practise in our code. I’ve spent a lot of time looking into the most appropriate way to manage configuration. I built our own tool for that to fit our processes and then came running back to move ComputerMinds towards using - and shaping - the solution that most of the Drupal community now uses.

Learn more about James on his profile page or if you like you can read more about the team at ComputerMinds.