Didn’t get enough on the home page? Here’s the slightly longer story.

I’m Dan, a digital creative based in the North of England.

I’m a Full-Stack Web Developer by trade and right now I’m working as a Full-Stack TypeScript Engineer for Hark. I’ve been building for the web since 2020 after working for around ten years in IT Service Management, closing out that chapter as an IT Security Manager.

I built my first website around 1998, it was either a Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z site, I forget. For some reason the stars never quite aligned and web development remained an on and off hobby until around 2012 when I decided to pursue it properly as a living. Regrettably, I was distracted from this goal yet again by the glitz and glamour of InfoSec, so it wasn’t until a voluntary redundancy in 2019 that I was finally afforded the room to pursue it properly. A short while after I landed my first software developer job.

Is it everything I dreamed of? More or less. I’m happy that I get to do what I enjoy as a job but I was never under any illusion it wouldn’t be just that… a job. You can only really build for the web professionally by building things for people who have money to pay you. More often than not, this will be for causes you couldn’t care less about, but I believe if you focus on the work and the process itself, and the people you do it with, you can derive an enormous amount of joy in any case.

If I could be free of the shackles of capitalism and could do anything at all I’d probably be building games. I try to convince myself this is possible now and again.

I’m always up for a serendipitous chat so say hello!