James Howlett

Frontend engineer, Copenhagen

Now

Senior Frontend Engineer

2022 –
Fjordbank (consumer banking app, 1.1M users)

I own the design system used by 9 squads: 74 components, tokens for 2 brands, 96% adoption. Rebuilt the transactions view in React Server Components; time-to-interactive fell from 3.1s to 0.9s on mid-range Android. I review around 300 PRs a year and delete a third of the code I meet.

Before

Frontend Engineer

2019 – 2022
Hygge Commerce (Shopify apps studio)

Shipped 4 storefront apps used by 12,000 shops. Wrote the accessibility pass that took the flagship app to WCAG 2.1 AA; refund-related support tickets fell 28% after the checkout rewrite.

Web Developer

2017 – 2019
Freelance, Copenhagen and Malmö

23 sites for restaurants and small studios. Learned to say no to carousels.

Stack

TypeScriptReact / RSCNext.jsCSS (yes, all of it) PlaywrightStorybookNodeGraphQLDesign tokens

Education & Else

B.Sc. Software Development

2017
IT University of Copenhagen

Talks & writing

"Design Tokens Without the Ceremony," CopenhagenJS 2024. Occasional posts at jameshowlett.example.com; one of them (on focus states) gets 9k reads a month.