Parallax Spotlight: Director James Hall
James Hall has been writing code since the age of 9 back in 1996. Fast forward 18 years and he’s now the lead back end developer and director at our Leeds based digital agency, Parallax.
One of James’ biggest scalps to date (aside from starting up and running a successful digital agency), is the creation of the free HTML5 client-side PDF generator jsPDF. A coding maverick and innovative entrepreneur, we caught up with James about jsPDF and life as a director at a Parallax.
James, your CV is pretty impressive for someone so young. How did your love for the web come about?
My love for the web stemmed from my love for creating things on computers. My first computer was a British-made Apricot IBM-clone from the early 1980s. The floppy disk drive no longer worked, so the only way to get new software on there would be to painstakingly type in source code from books I’d taken out at the library.
I’d spend most nights up late, punching in commands that I’d discovered in the GWBASIC manual attempting to make my own games. I later convinced my parents to buy me a computer. I reasoned that it’d be very low-cost as we’d never need to purchase software, I’d just be able to write it! (That proved to be quite difficult).
I left secondary school, then went to college for a whole week before dropping out and landing a job at digital agency and events company called Brightfive. After having a great time at Brightfive and making some great friends, I got the itch to try and set up my own digital agency.
We started out working from my apartment. I had a Mac Mini hooked up to my living room television, which is where I coded the first version of Expose. It all took off from there.
The Parallax brand is relatively new (following the recent rebrand from Snapshot Media), how do you find being a director of a digital agency, and how has the company grown over the past few years?
Being a director is exciting, though not without its challenges. We’ve grown year-on-year and moved into bigger offices. We’ve completed exciting projects from LED Billboards at Heathrow to iPhones unlocking rental cars as well as vast production music libraries.
We’re always trying to use new technology in exciting ways. Another example of pushing boundaries is our jsPDF product.
So how was jsPDF conceived?
One evening, I was browsing around StackOverflow answering questions.
There was an answer that has since been deleted saying that this would be impossible. That was reason enough for me to have a crack at it.
I started thinking through the problem and coded up a quick and dirty proof-of-concept. I pushed the code up to Google Code (this was before GitHub was popular) and the rest, as they say was history.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/742271/generating-pdf-files-with-javascript/778897#778897
Is it widely used?
It’s being used by staff at IBM, ThoughtWorks, Pixar, Thomson Reuters, Exxon Mobil, AT&T, and even Adobe themselves.
A lot of developers love it too. My friend Harry Roberts, who developed the inuit.css framework said this about me in Creative Bloq recently which was pretty cool –
James Hall is the closest thing you’ll find to an actual rockstar developer—I once walked past his office at about midnight to find him coding away on some open source stuff, drinking tequila from a pint glass. He’s off-the-scale kinds of intelligent (he made jsPDF as ‘a bit of a challenge’), always happy to help, and always learning how to do great things even better.
Are there any plans to develop it further or are there any other similar tools you’re currently working on?
We’re working on a couple of internal projects that will turn into products. There’s an experimental tool to use with jsPDF that we’re hoping to release soon.
What can we expect to see from you and the team at Parallax over the next few years?
We’ll continue to deliver web design and development projects as well as expanding our offerings for SEO and digital marketing. I’m excited about the digital landscape in Leeds at the moment and where our digital agency is placed. Things seem to be shaking up and that can only mean good things for Parallax.
If you weren’t working in web development what would you be doing?
I’d probably want to own my own bar and music venue. No doubt using cool technology throughout. One day…
Cheers James!