bruce thomas

Senior front-end developer & developer educator

contact

profile

Senior software engineer and AI engineer advocate (10+ years), working in London, onsite & remote. I’m a people person and thrive in paired programming and mentorship roles. My MA in Graphic Design gives me a good eye for UI/UX detail, and I am most excited by AI harnesses, N8N (automation & orchestration), AI engineering, SSGs, WebSockets, WebComponents, and Edge computation.

After work I run a life drawing community in Hackney, London.

skills

Technologies

JavaScript (vanilla ES6)
TypeScript
Node
React (JSX), Hooks
CSS (Tailwind, SASS, LESS)
HTML5
BASH, SSH
GIT, GitHub
Serverless/Edge compute (Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, Render, fly.io)
Vite, Esbuild
WebSockets, WebComponents
NPM
Liquid, Nunjucks
Quokka
Cypress, Jest/Vitest
Docker
Python
JAMstack
SVG

AI tooling

Copilot CLI
Claude code
Antigravity CLI
Aider, Codex, Pi
fzfast, airc
N8N automation & orchestration

UX / Production

Graphic design
Film production
Script writing / video editing
DaVinci Resolve / Premiere
OBS / Riverside Studio
YouTube channel management

languages

Fluent in English, Spanish & JavaScript 😄

experience

2023
present

News Corporation

Senior Engineer (AdTech) · June 2023 – Present

Re-architecture of legacy video advertising (64% increase in pre-roll revenue), refactored mobile web swipe events, migrated codebase from JSON5 to TypeScript, reduced runtime memory leaks via real-time logging/telemetry refactoring, presented on video coding and NotebookLLM, and mentored apprentices.
2021
2022

Ably Realtime

Developer Education · Remote

Lateral transfer to Developer Relations. Code-as-content tutorials, video production, YouTube channel rebrand and management.
Apr–Nov
2021

Ably Realtime

Mid-level Frontend Engineer · Remote

Ruby on Rails stack. Refactored legacy codebase to React and Tailwind during full corporate rebrand.
2019

NetSupport

Frontend Engineer, EdTech · ChromeOS

Research and development of a real-time screen-sharing Chrome extension using WebRTC and WebSockets.
15 yrs
freelance

Freelance Contractor

London & Barcelona

Commercial contracts across London and Barcelona. Agencies include LBi, Sapient, Pressco. Brands include Coca-Cola, Mars, Warner Bros, Cunard, Lloyds and Travelers Insurance.
early
career

Early Career

London · South Africa

Limited company founder (6 staff), Head of Studio at a DTP newspaper, Internet division lead at a print company in South Africa.
2024
present

Life Drawing Community (lifedrawing.art)

non-profit drawing community & experimental platform

Edge functions, Netlify Functions, Eleventy (11ty), WebSockets, N8N, Gemini Chat Agent, Eventbrite & Ticktailor API, Stripe, Instagram automation, Netlify, Imagekit CDN, Cloudflare Tunnels, self-hosted N8N, Immich, and JSON-LD.

personal project

Life Drawing Community (lifedrawing.art)

Non-profit drawing community & experimental platform.

Started a non-profit drawing community in Hackney. Life Drawing Art (Website). I use this platform to experiment with highly decoupled architecture, edge functions, static site generators, JAMstack engineering, and AI engineering workflows (N8N, Gemini chat agent, automated Instagram engagement, Eventbrite/Ticktailor integration). This website is my 'commercial' sandpit to test-drive emerging technologies on a real-world production website, with high-stakes.

references

Available on request. Direct references from:

Matthew O'Riordan — CEO & Founder, Ably Realtime
Iliana Avronova & Christopher Reidy — News Corp BA & Senior Dev
Neil Cadman — Project Lead, Regus
Rhian Lewis — Senior Automated QA Tester, AKQA