My name is Dan Clarke, and I'm an independent software developer with nearly 30 years of commercial experience.

I'm a Microsoft MVP who's loves to get involved in the community - I host a software development podcast called The Unhandled Exception podcast, run a local .NET user-group and also contributing via blog posts, public speaking, and YouTube videos. I also have multiple courses on the Dometrain training platform.

Originally from Lancashire, and now living in Oxfordshire (UK), and very happily married to the lovely Anna, with two amazing sons - Jack and Mason!

Unhandled Exception Podcast

I started my own software development podcast the end of 2020 (the year a lot of podcasts started!). Whilst I don't want to pigeon-hole it as a "dotnet podcast" (as it covers much more than just dotnet), it is certainly geared more towards the dotnet developer.

It's available in all major podcast apps (search for "Unhandled Exception"). There's also a website with all the episodes, show notes, and comments. The website also has links to the podcast on most popular podcast platforms.

.NET Oxford

I run the .NET Oxford user-group, together with Matt Nield. It's been going since 2017

My blog posts about the meetup can be found here - however I've stopped blogging about specific meetups now, so those are quite old. There's also a dedicated website with the meetup notes: www.dotnetoxford.com, which again I'm afraid is quite out of date.

Technical Background

I started programming commercially in 1998 working for a small company developing 3D applications. In 2002, I decided that I wanted to work in the games industry, which is when I moved down to Oxford working for Razorworks (an Empire Interactive studio). I was there for 6 years until the studio was bought out by Rebellion, which was also in Oxford. At Rebellion, I was involved in games such as Alien vs Predator and Sniper Elite 2.

Up until that point, I was mainly programming in C and C++. After three years at Rebellion, I decided I wanted to leave the games industry and try freelancing from home for a bit, focusing on web development rather than games. I had already done quite a few years freelance in my spare time, so decided to give it a go full time. Unfortunately, whilst I had the work, I found that working full-time from home wasn't for me at the time. I missed having people around me too much.

Whilst at this point, I had still done quite a bit of .NET development interspersed between C++ and PHP - I wanted to focus on it more and treat this as my primary development platform. I started working for an ecommerce company helping develop their platform. This was using ASP.NET Webforms, and heavily involved various integrations, including different payment gateways - eg. Cybersource and Paypal.

I was there for just over three years before moving to Centrix Software. Unfortunately after just 7 months there, Centrix went into administration, and the entire company was made redundant. I'd be considering the move to contracting for quite a while at this stage - so this was the perfect nudge to give it a try! I've now been contracting for quite a few years, working for different clients, and love it! I've been really lucky in that I've worked with some great clients, which has made the transition to contracting especially easy.

Since 2020, like a lot of developers, I've been working remotely. Unlike when I tried working from home in the past, I now love it! I think it's largely that when I tried it previously (see above), I wasn't really working with other people, so it was quite isolating. Now though, because of how things have changed with remote work (Teams, Zoom, etc being the norm), it's quite different.

Hobbies and Interests

Outside of work my main interest is still programming and technology. I also enjoy weight-lifting at my local gym - which I tend to visit daily. I like playing the guitar, but I find this hobby is quite on-and-off - I really need to get more consistent with this! In the past, I've been heavily into skydiving where I got to 250 skydives and was on a rookie formation team. I've also enjoyed many years of motorcycling, which I now no longer pursue due to being a parent!