James Smith
James is Head of Engineering at Apolitical, an organisation connecting public servants from around the world to share their best ideas. He was previously Head of Labs at the Open Data Institute, and is passionate about using open source and web technology to build a better future for all.
Talks I've Given
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OpenPolitics: Making Policy With Open Source Ideas
Featuring James Smith
Interested in learning how politics could be more democratic using open source tech principles? Check out this talk by James Smith!
github git open-source ruby openpolitics -
Pushing Jekyll to breaking point
Featuring James Smith
Jekyll is a static web development tool, used by GitHub Pages. Most uses are pretty simple, but you can do a lot more complex things with it too. This talk will explain how I’ve used git submodules, deeply nested JSON, CSV data, and other techniques to produce complex data-driven sites with rich...
lrug ruby ruby-on-rails -
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Adventures in early-adoption of open-source code
Featuring Sam Pikesley and James Smith
Last year, the ODI found themselves wanting to use the code behind gov.uk for a new project. In this talk James and Sam from the ODI tech team will share their experience of picking up a codebase which was open source, but never really designed for reuse, and what they learned along the way.
open-source source-code codebase ruby