Hi, I’m James Brunton and I’m a software engineer. I live and work in the North East of England and am currently working for Stirling PDF, an open-source PDF editor and, at least currently, the #1 most starred Java app on GitHub. Before I worked here, I spent seven years working at Rapita Systems in the aerospace industry.

Working on Stirling PDF has been interesting for me since it’s the first time I’ve worked on software in the open where anyone can read what I’ve produced. I’ve found it quite liberating that anything interesting that I work on there (like solving a complex problem or improving the developer experience) can be shared with other developers without having to worry whether I’m allowed to share it, since I can just send them a link to my pull request. That being said, PRs don’t necessarily provide the entire story and I sometimes find myself wanting to give a full write-up of things that I’ve worked on. I’m hoping this blog will let me do just that.

I’m not expecting this to become a major part of my life, I’ll probably just make an occasional post when I feel like I’ve got something to say. Hopefully at least some people will find these posts useful, or just find them not completely boring. We’ll have to wait and see!