I'm a principal software engineer and technical founder with 20+ years building high‑performance software across streaming media, gaming, and real‑time systems. I like hard, performance‑sensitive problems where great engineering is visible in the final product.
Most recently I worked on the video player for Peacock on Roku at NBCUniversal. Before that I led the team behind the Roku Video Player used by millions of Comcast subscribers in the Xfinity Stream channel, shipped Halo Infinite gameplay at 343 Industries, delivered the Roku channel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints end to end (live today as Gospel Stream), worked on discovery+ at Warner Bros. Discovery, and led an augmented reality project for NIST putting HoloLens 2 tools in the hands of first responders.
Alongside all of that, I've run NJLIGames since 2010 (incorporated as NJLIGames Ltd in 2015), where my proprietary cross‑platform C++ engine powers 10+ original games and VR experiences. Earlier in my career I shipped seven Nintendo DS, DSi, and Game Boy Advance titles (including MLB 2K10 and Glow Artisan, winner of Best Mobile Game Design at the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile awards). The full credit list, with two games you can play right now, is in my game development portfolio. I've written Lua for 15+ years and mentor developers on Codementor with a 5.0 rating.
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2026
Senior Roku Developer · NBCUniversal
Worked on the video player for Peacock on Roku (remote). Stabilized a crashing unit‑test suite built on Rooibos, the open‑source BrightScript test framework, integrated Adobe Edge analytics events for product and marketing, and simplified the codebase by removing a legacy Promise dependency.
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2024 - 2026
Senior Software Engineer · Neology
Designed multithreaded, real‑time software for lane‑side tolling systems processing millions of daily micro‑transactions under strict latency and accuracy requirements, spanning roadside and back‑office distributed subsystems.
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2023 - 2025
Principal Roku Developer · Comcast
Led the team owning the Roku Video Player used by millions of Comcast subscribers. Integrated the Roku Ad Framework into VOD with SCTE‑35 signal parsing and a FreeWheel ad‑URL system, served as technical lead on the Roku Interstitial Library integration that grew linear ad revenue 300%, and authored an RFC 6570 URITemplate library enabling the HLS to DASH migration.
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2021 - 2023
Principal Roku Developer · The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints
Led development of the Church's Roku channel, live today as Gospel Stream, carrying general conference broadcasts the Church says reach millions worldwide in over 70 languages. Added resume‑playback via the Roku registry and integrated the Youbora SDK for analytics and ads.
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2020 - 2022
Senior Software Engineer · Warner Bros. Discovery
Built screens and enhanced the event system for the discovery+ Roku app, implemented VoiceOver accessibility in the discovery+ iOS and tvOS apps in Swift, and integrated the Kochava SDK with a Python/Doxygen pipeline generating API docs from inline BrightScript comments.
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2021
Halo Gameplay Engineer · 343 Industries
Contributed to Halo Infinite gameplay in C++ and Lua, adding and enhancing gameplay features and resolving gameplay issues for a polished player experience.
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2010 - Present
Founder & Principal Software Engineer · NJLIGames Ltd
Architected and maintain a proprietary cross‑platform C++ game engine (Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android) powering 10+ original games and immersive VR experiences reaching thousands of users worldwide. Shipped the Gospel Stream channel through the Roku channel store, alongside a growing family of apps and SaaS products.
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One Group Central
An all‑in‑one private member portal for organizations: documents, announcements, chat, events, polls, and cryptographically anonymous voting on an append‑only hash‑chain ledger. Solo‑built: C++ (Crow) backend, Flutter clients on six platforms, Stripe billing, and a platform admin console.
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PostBaton
A social media scheduler that publishes to eleven platforms with an idempotency‑first engine: every post goes out exactly once, on time, with no double posts and no silent failures.
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Musicianle
The daily music guessing game: name the musician from their masked discography, one puzzle a day, eight guesses. C++20 backend, Flutter client, live and free.
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East the Beasts
An independent publishing press (no filler, just the work): structured journals like The 90 Day Field Manual, sudoku and activity books, and illustrated children's books, sold direct.
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Reword Me
An iMessage extension that rewrites messages into clear, simple language right inside the conversation. Accessible by design (Dark Mode, Dynamic Type, VoiceOver) and live on the App Store.
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NJLIGames
My independent studio since 2010 and the home of everything above: cross‑platform C++ engine work, shipped console and mobile games, and a growing family of apps and SaaS products.
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jamesfolk.me
The site you're reading. Hand‑built with semantic HTML, modern CSS, and a little vanilla JavaScript: no frameworks, no build step, structured data for search engines, and a perfect performance budget.
I take on consulting for Roku and connected‑TV projects through my studio (see Roku channel development), and I'm always glad to compare notes on principal and senior engineering work in streaming media, games, and systems. The fastest way to reach me: