Jim Rowe
About
I’m Jim — developer, occasional game designer, and a man who has strong opinions about both CMS architecture and board game mechanics, which is either impressive or a red flag depending on your perspective.
I’ve spent most of my career building things for the web: CMS driven sites, the many platforms built from scratch, and more front-end frameworks than I care to count. Somewhere in there I also started building tabletop and online games for fun — multiplayer prototypes, social deduction games, map generators for things nobody asked for — because the itch to make things doesn’t stop just because you clocked off.
Outside of code, two things take up most of my remaining brain space: rugby, which I played for years and now mostly watch from the safety of a sofa or the sidelines, and board games, which have quietly taken over a worrying amount of shelf space at home.
This site is mostly a place to point at things I’ve made. It’s not a pitch — I’m not freelancing or looking for work, just keeping a record of the stuff I’ve built.
Things I’m using a lot these days
- Umbraco — .NET CMS, still going strong
- Sanity — headless CMS done properly
- Vue / Nuxt — front end of choice when I get to pick
- Colyseus — node game server
- Pixi JS — WebGPU/WebGL renderer
My projects
- nuisancevalue — multiplayer bridge-sim game built with lance.gg and pixi.js
- Covert Mission — originally a web interface for playing a group game similar to Werewolf but repurposed as a team chat platform
- Emissary — multiplayer turn based empire building, diplomacy, economic and war game
- Jumpgates — re-imagining of nuisancevalue using Colyseus with a ship interior as well as exterior
- Low Block Soccer — Retro top-down multiplayer soccer game
A rough timeline
| Years | What | Mostly built with |
|---|---|---|
| 2000-2005 | Backoffice development for finance software house, lastminute.com and local utility | VB6, Java, HTML |
| 2005–2009 | First web work — brochure sites and small CMS builds | C#, PHP, WordPress |
| 2009–2013 | Ecommerce, which taught me more about patience than about retail | Magento, PHP, jQuery |
| 2013–2023 | Ten years working for myself as Jimcode | Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React |
| 2015–2017 | Co-founded Tremr, a social blogging platform for citizen journalism | React, Rails, Postgres |
| 2023– | Head of Development at TPA — larger clients, better problems | Vue, Nuxt, .NET, Umbraco, Sanity |
| Ongoing | Games, prototypes and things nobody asked for | Colyseus, Pixi JS |