James Robinson

I'm James, and I've been making things my whole life.

I was born and raised in England, in a house that was always full of computers — my dad worked for a PC maintenance company, so there was usually something half-apart on a table. I got hooked early: a ZX81, then a parade of Sinclair Spectrums and Amstrads, an Atari ST, and eventually an IBM XT running DOS 3 that felt like touching the future. At school there were BBC Micros, where I wrote my first chatbot in BASIC before I really understood what I was doing, and lost hundreds of hours to Elite — a whole galaxy built from a few kilobytes and a clever bit of math. That game quietly set my taste for everything since: systems that make something rich out of simple rules.

By fifteen, that curiosity had turned practical. My family ran a video rental store, and I wrote its management system myself — in QBasic, because that's what I had and the shop needed it. In the back room I fixed people's computers and modded Sega Megadrives. I didn't know it yet, but that was the whole pattern of how I'd work for the rest of my life: something needs doing, so I figure out how to build it. I've started and run little computer businesses on and off ever since — repairs, refurbs, the kind of hands-on work that keeps you honest about how machines actually behave.

I studied electronic engineering — discrete logic, the close-to-the-metal stuff most people never see under the software — and I've done freelance hardware design since, including a posture-sensing wearable for the medical industry (the details I have to keep to myself). That foundation never left me. When I build software, I'm not gluing libraries together and hoping; I understand the machine from the silicon up.

Everything I make comes back to one idea: built and believable. Craft you can see the seams of. Honest engineering that does exactly what it says, with no more machinery than the job needs. If it doesn't need a framework, it doesn't get one — I'd rather understand the join than hide it behind a jig.

Four countries later, I'm in Texas now, building a handful of my own products and side projects — a workout-tracking app, a maze tower-defense game, this site and its six wildly different faces, all hand-built. I'm not actively looking for work. But the right project, for the right money, will always have my attention.