About James Portman

I'm a multidisciplinary creator working across screen, page, and canvas.

I design and ship full-stack web apps — increasingly with AI in the loop — make a microdrama series, write near-future fiction, and paint original landscapes of Georgian Bay and the Ontario region. My recent work spans a solo-built geography game, Baylight: After Image (a story told as microdrama, novel and audiobook, in six languages), and an online gallery of my paintings and photographs.

The other half of the work is engineering programs. Twenty years of multi-track delivery in production B2B SaaS and data environments — seven-figure budgets, distributed teams across North America, the UK, and India — at NielsenIQ, Aimia (Aeroplan), and Bell, and consulting as a technical program manager now. Building and running five live products solo is what keeps that honest: schema migrations, connection pooling, flaky suites, deploy gates.

Whether the medium is code, film, prose, or oil, the throughline is the same: make the thing end to end, and sweat the craft.

University of Waterloo — Honours B.Sc., Co-op Mathematical Physics · PMP · PMI-ACP · CSP-ScrumMaster · CSP-Product Owner · AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner