Chartered IT Professional by trade, flying instructor by calling, and — strictly for the fun of it — a builder of small, sharply-scoped games and simulators.
About
James was raised on a working farm in Norfolk, next to a wartime airfield once flown from by the USAF's 100th Bomb Group. Growing up around veterans' reunions and the occasional flypast gave him an early, stubborn fascination with aircraft — one that eventually caught up with him as an adult.
Today he's based in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his day job is engineering and IT leadership, his weekends are often spent instructing at the local flying school, and his evenings tend to get lost in whatever small game or simulator he's currently building — usually one that scratches an itch nobody else has bothered to build for.
Before any of that, though, there were five years spent working the family farm and shop — Wilby & Sons, in Norfolk — a grounding in rural life that still shapes his interest in the countryside and conservation today.
He holds a BSc (Hons) in Computing Science from Aston University, completed the High Performance Leaders Programme at Cranfield School of Management, and is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Chartered IT Professional (CITP).
Career
James's IT leadership career spans five sectors and three decades — starting on a Norfolk farm, running through some of the UK's best-known automotive and construction names, and landing, fittingly, back in aviation on the electric side of it.
Projects
Outside the day job, James designs and builds compact games and apps — mostly steering Dyad and Google AI Studio through a phased build spec, on a consistent stack of React Three Fiber, Zustand and Tailwind for the web, and React Native with Expo on mobile.
A word puzzle built around a simple, sharp idea: every vowel has vanished, and it's down to you to reconstruct the word from what's left.
Play it ↗A target sport simulator built to faithful SAGL club rules — clean-bull scoring, "A.N. Other" logic and all — wrapped in a dark pub-and-club aesthetic.
A single-file METAR/TAF aviation weather decoder — the kind of tool only a pilot would think to build for fun.
A daily web puzzle with persistent score tracking and social sharing, including a Facebook integration built around the platform's own quirks.
A seeded daily puzzle PWA using a Mulberry32 PRNG, a naval dark theme and streak tracking, shipped as a complete four-file package with service worker and manifest.
A colour and shape matching game with an AI hint system layered on top of Framer Motion animation.
A comedic drone-herding game with a deliberately "naughty sheep" AI mechanic — a nod to a certain Cotswolds farming show.
A timed word-chain game, later specified out into a full mobile build.
Stratford-upon-Avon
James's connection to Stratford-upon-Avon runs well beyond an address. He's put years of first-hand local knowledge into a travel-and-community guide for the town — first as a content-rich website, and more recently as a complete guidebook.
The book covers 25 chapters and was produced with a professional PDF pipeline built on ReportLab — proof that his engineering habits apply just as well to publishing as they do to software.
Stratford-upon-Avon — Shakespeare's Hometown ↗Countryside & Home
When he's not at a keyboard or in a cockpit, James is usually walking his cockapoo, out on his bike, or spending time outdoors with a longstanding interest in countryside conservation and farming. That connection to rural life isn't just a hobby — it's the reason an app like Bell Target exists in the first place.
Rural and farming communities are a small, often-overlooked corner of the App Store. James's own background around countryside life and conservation gives his ideas in this space a genuine edge.
Ideas in the pipeline include a habitat and land management log, a farm walk companion app, and — because not everything has to be practical — a whisky journal.
Walking his cockapoo and cycling are the two things most likely to pull James away from a screen entirely.