Damien Guardhe/him
Damien has spent four decades writing software, most of it on the tools other developers depend on — .NET at Microsoft, the Atom editor at GitHub, SDKs and developer experience at Auth0, and the official MongoDB provider for Entity Framework Core.
Specialties
Why Damien
Thousands of public commits, going back more than a decade. Open source, client work and things built for their own sake, and most of it readable before you commission anything: the official MongoDB provider for Entity Framework Core, Tree-sitter C# behind GitHub's semantic code features, ElasticLINQ. Features delivered, problems solved, and the reasoning left in the pull requests.
Attention to detail, from the interface to the threat model. Polished user interfaces at one end. At the other, security lead across xbox.com, and the first internet banking system on Temenos Globus for Lloyds TSB Private Banking. It's the same discipline in both places: think a design through to the end, and build for every path a real person takes.
Developer experience is standing in somebody else's shoes. He co-created Microsoft's first fluent API, Code First for Entity Framework in 2011, as part of a 3-person team. Then developer tooling at GitHub, Auth0 and MongoDB. Guide users and developers along a path that works, and adoption follows.
Work leaves documented, tested and structured for whoever picks it up. The point of an engagement is that it ends, and that the next person to touch the code doesn't have to be him.
At Intracia he runs engineering and operations — the CMS itself, the infrastructure it runs on, and the security of both.
About Damien
Damien started out coding on a ZX Spectrum. The paid work began with AS/400 banking systems, then an extranet portal for Ricoh, written in ASP. In 2000 he co-founded Contract 5, now C5 Alliance, and it was there he built that Lloyds TSB system. Real money moving correctly was the whole job, and it set the pattern for most of what came after.
Microsoft came next, for LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, with eighteen months in Redmond as security lead across xbox.com. Then Netflix, and CenturyLink Cloud as a principal engineer. At GitHub he worked on the Atom editor and headed up the Atom IDE initiative, and at Auth0 he was a principal engineer on developer experience and SDKs. Most recently he has been working with MongoDB on their provider for Entity Framework Core.
He lives on the island of Guernsey with his wife Kerry and his two children.
Damien has worked for
From the blog
What we've learned building software, and the opinions we came away with.
You don't need WordPress any more
I ran WordPress for years — my own sites and clients', from cPanel to HHVM to a dedicated server. Then came the hack while I was asleep, and the content I couldn't manipulate. Why I left, and what I run instead.
Reintroducing Intracia
A new site, a clear list of the work we take on, and Intracia out in the open for the first time.