About

Senior Drupal developer. Seventeen-plus years building for the web — from PHP frameworks to enterprise Drupal platforms.

About — James Tarleton

Early career PHP / Symfony 1 Jul 2008 – Dec 2013

Current focus Enterprise Drupal Jan 2014 – present

About

Senior Drupal developer with over seventeen years of professional experience building for the web — from early PHP frameworks to modern enterprise Drupal platforms.

Background

I have been writing PHP professionally since 2008, starting with large-scale, high-traffic web projects before moving into enterprise Drupal development. My early work coincided with the rise of PHP MVC frameworks — Symfony, Zend Framework, CakePHP — and gave me a strong foundation in object-oriented PHP that has served me well ever since. In 2014, I shifted full-time into Drupal, which has been my primary platform ever since, spanning Drupal 7 through the modern Drupal stack and Composer workflow.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to work on production systems for a range of organizations — including Fortune 500 companies, international nonprofits, government agencies, financial institutions, and philanthropic foundations.

Sectors & Projects

My client work has touched a wide range of industries. A portfolio sampling:

📚 Publishing / Fortune 500 Barnes & Noble — SparkNotes literature study guides and educational content platform.

📢 Advertising / Nonprofit ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and Ad-ID, the digital supply chain identification system for the ad industry.

🌍 Charity & Philanthropy Results for Development (R4D), a Gates Foundation–backed global health and education nonprofit; Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, including Hebrew translation support.

🎓 Education / Athletics Auburn University Athletics departmental website — built while still a student there.

💹 Finance & FinTech ICI.org (Investment Company Institute), MIAX Global options exchange, and BSX (Bermuda Stock Exchange).

🏙️ Government / Transportation Multiple NYC Department of Transportation platforms: BikeShare, ScooterShare, Parking Permits, and Street Improvement Projects.

🏥 Healthcare Institute of Pediatric Nursing, Pediatric Nursing Certification Board, and Definitive Healthcare analytics.

Data Migration & ETL

A recurring part of my work has involved migrating legacy content and data into Drupal from a wide range of source systems, including flat files, CSV and Excel exports, older database formats, and non-Drupal MySQL databases. These projects have ranged from straightforward content migrations to complex, multi-source efforts requiring significant data transformation and cleanup. I am experienced with the Drupal Migrate API, Feeds and Feeds Tamper, and custom PHP processing pipelines for large datasets.

Tools & Technologies

Day-to-day I work across the Drupal stack and the infrastructure underneath it.

About This Site

This site is a working notebook — a place to write up things I have learned, reference material I return to often, and occasional thoughts on Drupal development. It is built in Drupal and runs a custom theme.

I also maintain a small collection of contributed Drupal modules on drupal.org.

Feel free to reach out via the contact page.