I'm James Bury

I first became interested in programming in high school when I created an arcade machine using a Raspberry Pi for my school's front lobby with a few classmates. I fell in love with the perpetual process of designing something, writing it out in code, adapting to things you learn about the problem along the way, then eventually watching it work on its own.

In college at UNC Chapel Hill, I became a TA for the course on Java Design Patterns. Through teaching office hours and leading recitations, I learned how to verbally step through code and solve problems with others which has proved to be one of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in software engineering.

During my junior year, a few of my friends and I created Machine Learning models for predicting whether an NBA shot would go in using data from the 2014-2015 season as a final project for our Machine Learning course. After presenting, one professor we worked with provided us with grant funding to present at conferences at both Harvard University and the University of Denver.

The summer before my senior year, I interned at Fidelity Investments. For my internship project, I created an internal web application to monitor for errors and use a dataset I created to predict solutions to each error log using a Random Forest model.

Since graduating, I have been working at Fidelity Investments on a Platform Engineering team. My work has largely involved writing Java Spring frameworks for our business unit’s applications to use to integrate new technologies, such as Azure Service Bus, Azure Blob Storage, and Drools. I have also created multiple deployment pipelines for new applications, migrated existing applications from running on-premise to running in Azure Kubernetes Service, worked as a tech lead for a team of new hires, and developed my own team’s internal Java Spring applications.