Junior Software Engineer with a background in digital media. In January, 2025, I enrolled at Makers Academy, a selective, intensive London-based bootcamp designed for career-switchers. I chose the software engineering and DevOps tracks to complement my previous experience in front-end design.

On the 16-week, full-time, on-site course, I gained practical experience in group work, paired programming, agile project development, TDD, Python, AWS, and CI/CD workflows. On the DevOps specialism track, I got hands-on with DevOps tools including Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. I'm now teaching myself TypeScript, Node.js, and Vue.js.

With an award-winning education in art history, and background in web development and digital comms & media, I understand the value of visual design and analytical thinking. As a magazine and copy writer, I know how to communicate complex systems in simple terms. That, combined with my curiosity, growth mindset, constant motivation (and varied work history) means I can talk to you about the controversy of the C in CSS, and the parallels between RESTful APIs and beehives, and why Deliveroo was inevitably doomed.

I'm open for work as of May 2025.

Take a look at my work, bring me onboard as an open-source contributor, and put a face to the name and meet me for a coffee:

• 📧 hi@jkwlsn.dev
• 🌐 jkwlsn.dev
• 🤝 linkedin.com/in/jkwlsn
• 📍 London, UK

I'm drawing on my time spent working as a beekeeper to build apis-api, a RESTful HTTP API for managing beehives. It's an work-in-progress designed to teach me new skills and Python techniques, as well as build a working application. Once the Python / Postgres / FastAPI backend is complete, I'll build a Typescript / Vue.js frontend. Watch and star the repo, and follow my progress on the project page.

I'll be following up with apis-app, a TypeScript and Vue.js frontend. I'll be focusing on offline capabilities.

Years before I studied at Makers, I taught myself web development fundamentals and coded a few websites:

• I helped design students at the Royal College of Arts, London, build their final project website: rca-poster-archive.co.uk [defunct]
  • Opted for static site generator, vanilla CSS and JS for simplicity of design and speed.
  • Built pipelines to generate responsive webp images.
  • Hosted static assets on AWS S3.
• I rebuilt the website of a London-based art gallery / hair salon: dkuk.biz [defunct]
  • Mobile-first design
  • Focused on performance
• I rebuilt the website of Australian photography magazine Paper Journal: paper-journal.com [defunct]
  • Rebuilt entire codebase: focused on mobile-first, high performance design, introduced responsive images, added static HTML cache, fixed broken infinite scroll.
  • Cut load times from 500ms to 80ms.
  • Achieved 97% on Lighthouse.