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 built Roku streaming apps at NBCUniversal. Before that I led the team behind the Roku Video Player used by millions of Comcast subscribers, shipped Halo Infinite gameplay at 343 Industries, delivered the All Saints Channel end to end for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints, 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 LLC since 2010, 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). 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
Built Roku streaming apps for NBCUniversal (remote). Stabilized the Rooibos unit‑test suite by fixing crash‑causing memory issues, integrated Adobe Edge analytics events for product and marketing, and simplified the codebase by removing a legacy Promise dependency.
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2025 - 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 · Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints
Led development of the All Saints Channel for Roku, delivering live and pre‑recorded events to millions of users. 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 LLC
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
Play. Create. Harmonize. A music project currently in the works, the next product from the NJLIGames studio. Sign up on the site for launch updates.
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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'm currently available for principal and senior engineering roles in streaming media, game development, and systems programming, and for consulting on Roku and connected‑TV projects (see Roku channel development). The fastest way to reach me: