Jim Fisher – Product Engineer

Let’s build an amazing product and a profitable business! Just give me customer contact and let me iterate. I’ve spent 12+ years in full-stack dev. TypeScript, React, Postgres, AWS, etc., but I’m not fussy. I’ve spent 5+ years in product management, including Pusher Channels ($12M ARR), and my two startups, Vidrio and TigYog.

Get in touch! 👋

Experience

Feb 2023 – current: Senior engineer at Slite. Slite lets employees document their knowledge, and search all company knowledge across Slack, Google Drive, etc. I helped build Slite’s AI writing and AI search features, maintained their rich text editor, and built several tools for faster product iteration.

2021 – current: CEO at TigYog, my own app and company. TigYog lets you write interactive online courses. Details on request.

Apr. 2020 – Feb. 2021: CEO at Vidrio, my own app and company. Vidrio lets you make presentations with a screen recording and webcam. Grew the company from $0 revenue to a maximum of $1600/month. Built macOS and Windows versions, built website and marketing, et cetera. Key tech: Swift, Electron, WebGL.

Jun. 2018 – Apr. 2020: Technical Product Manager for Pusher Channels at Pusher. Companies use Pusher Channels to add realtime features to their apps (e.g. chat messages, or New York Times live election night charts). I moved into product management to help grow the product. During my time we grew from ~$8M ARR to ~$12M ARR. We had very limited resources and this was an exercise in growing a product without adding new features. I was the key link between Engineering, Sales and Marketing, and the public representative of the product in many sales opportunities.

Mar. 2016 – Jun. 2018: Software Engineer at Pusher.

May 2014 – Feb. 2016: Software Pilot at Trifork, consulting with many global clients. Trifork is an international software consultancy and “pilot” is a funny word for consultant. Projects included:

Jan. – May 2014: Software Engineer at Arqiva WiFi. Arqiva provided white-label public WiFi (e.g. the free public WiFi at Heathrow airport). Our team rebuilt the ‘captive portal’ (that annoying login page you see when you connect to free public WiFi). I created the feature that gave you free public WiFi access if you were willing to download an app or watch a video. I wrote the functional and performance tests for the captive portal using JMeter. (On the side, I also built Arqiva’s revenue tracker, which gathered messy revenue data from heterogeneous, ancient sources.) Key tech: PHP and MySQL.

May 2012 – Sep 2013: Software Developer at YUDU Media, leading a team of four. Traditional publishers use YUDU to create online facsimiles of their magazines and books (think: PDF reader on steroids with cool “page turn” animations). I worked alongside the team at Softwire, a software consultancy. I worked in product management, design, development, and maintenance. I maintained the two front-ends, a Flash version for the web, and an Adobe AIR version for desktop, Android, OS X, and iOS. I also led a major redesign of the management interface. Key tech: Java Spring; Ramaze (a dead fork of Ruby on Rails); Oracle, MySQL, jQuery, Bootstrap.

2006 – 2014: Director and Secretary of Lexden Montessori. Lexden Montessori was a nursery in Colchester. I started the nursery with my mum in 2006. I worked in business planning, market research and advertising, administration and secretarial duties, and web design and maintenance for lexdenmontessori.com, including an online fee calculator.

2012 – 2013: Branding, marketing consultancy, and web design for The Gilgil Trust. The Gilgil Trust provided young people around the town of Gilgil in Kenya with shelter, health-care, and help in their education and careers.

2010: Branding for Pembroke House. Pembroke House is a private Kenyan prep school. As of 2021, they’re still using the logo and brand that I designed. In the words of their Commercial Director, ‘James has worked with me on new brand designs for Harambee Schools Kenya (see below), a charity, and Pembroke House school, a prep school. In both cases his work was of the highest quality, and reflected a passion for design, but also for getting under the skin of the organisation he is designing for. I wouldn’t hesitate to use James again for any design projects that I might have.’

2010: Award-winning brand and web design for Harambee Schools Kenya. HSK is a charity building schools around Gilgil in rural Kenya. GWS Media gave the website an award, commending its ‘plain, clear English; striking design, and beautiful images.’ The new branding and website brought in at least £53,000 of funding, including from UBM (the global media and comms giant) and HSBC, who made HSK their official corporate charity after finding the website.

2009: Software Developer at Caring Homes. Caring Homes is a large UK group of care homes. Developed an internal system for managing care homes and CSCI reports Key tech: Django and Postgres.

Education

2010–12: M.Sc. with distinction in Computing Science at Imperial College. In my individual project, ‘Verifying a balanced-tree index implementation in VeriFast’, I implemented left-leaning red-black trees in C, then proved key properties of it using VeriFast and separation logic.

2006–9: B.A. with first-class honors in History at the University of York. My dissertation was about robots.

2004–6: Six A-levels. At Colchester Royal Grammar School. History (A), Computing (A), General Studies (A), Physics (B), Mathematics (B), Art and Design (B) (actually this last one was at Grey Friars Community College).

2002–4: Eleven GCSEs at Colchester Royal Grammar School.

Other courses:

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