James Moxley

“I’m passionate about great design”

I started programming at an early age, volunteering at the Virtual Ventures, a summer camp at Carleton University when I was 12 years of age. Around the same time I started to learn how to white water kayak at Esprit Rafting. I spent a couple summers working as a video kayaker on the Ottawa river. When I wasn’t shooting video I designed websites for local professional athletes. I gained attention from the work I did for the athletes and was soon doing work for the sponsors such as Level Six Clothing and Necky Kayaks.

After High school I studied Art at Sheridan College in Toronto, I decided classical animation was not my strong point. I was a well rounded artist and programmer, but my knowledge of databases and enterprise applications was not strong enough. I earned a diploma at EIS College in Ottawa, learning how to develop enterprise web applications, using an Oracle 8i Database.

After graduating there were thousands of Oracle Developers in Ottawa, but very few Flash Developers, I worked for a Defence Contractor ADGA creating e-learning applications in Flash. After 7 months the e-learning project was completed so I decided to build an e-commerce store from scratch in ColdFusion for a store called Monograms Plus. The site was great, allowing people to buy online gifts and have them customised. After the e-commerce store project finished I worked for Magma in Ottawa as a Coldfusion and Flash Developer. I learned a lot there but I was still fresh, I remember a colleague saying to me anything you can do in Flash I can do in AJAX. He was five years before Steve Jobs declaring Flash dead.

After a year at Magma, I was 21, wanted to go on an adventure. I applied to several head hunters and was offered a job interview in Dundee, Scotland. I flew out for a week to the interview, the Monday after, I received a call with a job offer. Today I work with the same company developing online health software systems for the National Health Care System.