James Maclean

Designer and Developer

Design skills

I see the developer portion of my career as a secret continuation of my design work.

The initial urge to start coding was borne out of frustration with my designs being implemented poorly. In hindsight I realise that what I had in my head went way beyond static visuals, most of which was lost when I handed my work over to the dev team.

Designing as a developer

As a frontend dev I continue to solve user problems and apply my design skills, its just the tools and others perception of my work is different. Where I work today I am responsible for the look and feel of lendable.co.uk, autolend.co.uk and 3 other 'white label' sites that use the same react code but with different branding. Managing these 5 styles is a constant compromise between technical feasibility and maintaining each ones visual integrity. I play an active part in designing the more complex components and flows. I work with some great designers and have at times given them tips on how to present their work.

My favourites

The areas of design I'm best at are classic 'Interaction Design' and Typesetting. I know which controls are appropriate for a given interaction and why. How the sometimes the context of a control changes what people expect it to do. I also did an hour long talk about the history of typography from ancient Sumer to the modern era to an audience of backend devs and product people. (and no one fell asleep! I even got questions).

My Modus Operandi (MO)

When working on a new problem I focus on the context. The first thing I do is sit down with some (often from product) and write fragments of text that represent the content of a UI. I take the fragments and arrange them into flows, then I take that away to produce wireframes. Occasionally I will do a high fidelity design but this is increasingly rare as I prefer to take the design into code and then review it with another designer to apply the final polish.

Development skills

Today I work with React.js, Next.js, Redux at a senior level. I’m an expert with CSS and HTML and can achieve pixel perfect results with performant animations. I'm also passionate about writing code that others can read and maintain. A well written .tsx file should tell a story about the intentions of the code and the developer.

Technologies

My mantras

These describe my personal approach to writing code in team and also give a flavour of what it's like to work with me.

Keep learning.

I believe that to work in software development you need to be studious. I like to understand things properly and feel uneasy trusting black-boxes.

Read the code.

Spending time reading a codebase can help dispel the urge to re-write everything and helps me to communicate how it works to non-technical people.

Do it properly.

Only cut corners when it’s a good idea and don’t think you are too important to suffer a little tedium.

Any plan is better than no plan.

A little time spend thinking about what you are going to do before you start is always worth while. Even if the plan is to improvise.

Listen first, then speak.

Whether it’s a group situation or one on one, you have to listen first if you want anyone to hear you. To truly listen you have to be open to being wrong. The same also applies to code-style and architectural decisions, you have use a setup before you can suggest an improvement.

Nothing is impossible.

I find when people say “it can’t be done” they are making a judgement on the cost vs benefit without discussing either. When you share the your knowledge with people to help them understand what they are asking you can often find to a pragmatic solution, or at least drop it with confidence.

Put the fire out now, find the cause later.

I expect myself and others to make mistakes. I want to be the person who others feel confident coming to when there is a problem. I believe it is how you plan for and deal with them is more important than never making them. When some one comes to me with a problem or bad situation I will listen and help first before discussing how it could have been avoided. When the time comes I hope others can do the same for me.

Give credit when it’s due.

If some one else had the idea that I’m working on I make sure everyone know where it came from. If a person helped me, either with practical work, advice or coaching I want those around me to know where success comes from. I feel it is important for me personally to do these things because of my background I tend to win peoples trust more quickly and get given the benefit of the doubt more often than others.

You won’t remember.

That task you said you would do, the solution you just discovered; write it down, and do so in a way that assumes you will have forgotten the context. Your future self or whoever else finds your words will thank you.

Work History

Lendable

Associate Engineering Manager

Sep 2025 - Present · 10 mos

• Managing a team of 5 Senior frontend engineers working on the main onboarding flows for the loans business.
• Partner closely with the Product Manager to align priorities, capacity and scope — ensuring the team is focused on the right work at the right time.
• Led hiring to grow the engineering team, owning the interview process and hiring decisions.
• Restructured team ceremonies and cadence to reduce friction and improve delivery flow.
• Running regular 1:1s with individual development goals to support the growth and progression of each engineer.

Senior Frontend Engineer

Jun 2022 - Aug 2025 · 3 yrs 3 mos

• Helped build and maintain a 'white-label' theme system that supports 5 different brands.
• Reduced technical debt by seeking out depreciated features and coordinating efforts with backend teams.
• Working with product, design and backend teams in a financially regulated environment.
• Took on delivery focused management duties which helped balance workload, increase collaboration with other teams and ensured smooth delivery of multiple projects.
• Ensured high accessibility standards though use correct HTML and constantly evaluating the visual design.
• Worked with products and design teams to create clear interfaces and wrote copy that complies with FCA standards.
• Designed, developed and maintained features on the Next.js frontend that also work across multiple other brands.
• Contributed to the development of a company-wide design system, ensuring seamless integration across all products.
• Coached junior engineers to improve their confidence presenting technical proposals and communicating effecting with product and backend teams.

Frontend Engineer

Nov 2019 - May 2022 · 2 yrs 7 mos

MyBuilder

• I used product, design and front-end skills to increase sign-up of new trade members by 5% year on year.
• Built a mini Email design system with PHP - This provides an intuitive interface to advanced Email HTML styling techniques allowing non-front-end-specialists to work on emails with confidence.
• Maintenance of various ReactJS apps throughout the main site. The projects are built with: React, CSS-in-JS, Styled Components, Node, Yarn (workspaces), Webpack, Jest and some Typescript
• Created a CSS framework, site and accessible (Symfony) forms in an FCA regulated insurance environment. This project was built with Symfony 5, Docker, Webpack Encore, SASS, Twig, PHPUnit and Vanilla js.
• Implemented a design system to be able to share styles between React apps and older Symfony systems. Some tech was tried but rejected: Styled System, Rebass, a custom rebuild of Styled System in Typescript. The final project was delivered using: Tailwind, PostCSS to allow class names to be used alongside Styled Components / CSS-in-JS whilst referencing the same core design tokens.
• Collaborated with product team to design and implement conversion optimizations that was a major contributor to the business unit moving into profitability.
• Increased the 'speed' of key SEO pages by 50% https://tech.mybuilder.com/get-started-with-web- performance

Frontend Developer

Aug 2019 - Nov 2019 · 4 mos

Objective Manager

• Addressed 7 years of CSS tech debt and build a methodology for the team to modularise new CSS so they could actually make changes.
• Implemented a custom Bootstrap 3 build that fit the specific needs of the business in a flexible way

Senior UX Designer

Jun 2016 - Jun 2019 · 3 yrs 1 mo

Fidelity International

• I was instrumental in the re-design of the FundsNetwork advisory investment platform which has gone on to win industry awards.
• I mentored Junior and Mid level UX designers to develop their technical and presentation skills.

UX Designer

Sep 2015 - Mar 2016 · 7 mos

Citi Bank

• I was the first person to do user research on the trading floor at CitiBank. After an extensive ethnographic study, I designed features for a UI responsible for moving billions of dollars per day.

UX Designer, Junior UX designer, UX Intern

May 2013 - Sep 2015 · 2 yrs 5 mos

Caplin Systems

• Designed key product features for the ‘Sales Trader’ product that are still part of the key offering 10 years later.

Artworker

Jan 2013 - May 2013 · 5 mos

CashZone

• Working part time to support my part-time Masters degree studies.
• Designing vinyl wraps, custom surrounds and points of sale for cash machines.

Junior Graphic Designer

Mar 2009 - Aug 2012 · 3 yrs 6 mos

Wates Construction

• My favourite part of this job was producing peoples presentations. They came to me for ‘just’ PowerPoint and I gave them more speaking confidence by listening to their pitches.
• Designed, printed and hand-bound tender documents.