About Jamie Barton
Hi, I'm Jamie — a Geordie web developer from North East of England. I've been building websites since the Flash & SwishMax days of 1999. These days, I work with Node, TypeScript, React, Astro, and Go to build apps and APIs.
By day, I'm a DX Engineer at bunny.net, working on CLIs, SDKs, docs, examples, the developer platform, and enabling developers to build at scale. By night (and usually early mornings), I'm hacking on side projects — too many to count.
I care deeply about developer experience, building tools that feel great to use, and helping others learn. Whether it's writing docs, recording demos, or code, I try to make complex things feel simple.
Want to learn more? Read on for the full story.
Where it all began...
My very first computer was a Time PC — a chunky beige box that kicked off a lifelong obsession. I started out building websites with FrontPage, targeting Netscape Navigator. By the time I was 11, I'd even built a website for my school.
I spent most of my school days glued to the computer. I ran forums, launched small web hosting companies, and built communities around the things I loved. Just operating forum software wasn't enough — I wanted to improve it. This led to my first open source contributions. That early collaboration lit a spark that never really went out.
I also did my GCSEs in IT & Maths a year earlier than most. So, yeah — the days of "always being on the computer" worked out alright in the end.
My hosting projects taught me everything from how to wrestle with cPanel and WHM to building a custom client management platform that could auto-provision accounts with FTP & SSH access.
Somewhere along the way, I created and sold GoingOutfit — a site where users could share outfits and earn style badges. Basically Instagram before Instagram.
Learn, Do, Share, Repeat
I went on to study Web Development and Management at college, where I built projects like Familybooth — a platform for families to share photos and plan trips. While at university (which I later dropped out of), I freelanced for local businesses and even contracted remotely for a company in Canada, working from my bedroom in the UK before remote work was the norm.
During this time, I picked up PHP and Ruby on Rails, which led to a five-year stretch doing Rails professionally. I later worked with Angular, getting my first taste of building user facing dashboards, which suited me perfectly.
As the ecosystem evolved, so did I. I dove into Node.js, React, and GraphQL, eventually landing a fullstack role at a startup building a headless ecommerce API. Before "DX" was a buzzword, I was already obsessed with it — writing SDKs, building tooling, and documenting everything to make other developers' lives easier.
Developer Experience, Always
Since then, I've stayed focused on the kind of work I love — building tools that developers actually enjoy using. I've worked with a headless commerce API (before headless was a thing), a headless CMS, a GraphQL platform, and eventually joined The Guild, where I contributed to the GraphQL ecosystem and shared learnings through short video tutorials at graphql.wtf.
More recently, I became fascinated by local-first software — apps that work offline, sync seamlessly, and feel lightning fast. That interest led me to Turso, where I helped shape the future of embedded databases.
I never stop tinkering. I contribute to ENS service provider NameHash Labs. I've built libraries for headless commerce, drop shipping, and cart management. I've attended over 50 developer conferences and meetups along the way — always learning, always shipping, always finding joy in the craft.