Damien Guard^he/him

Why Damien

He has delivered software for some of the biggest names in tech, and many successful applications and sites for less well-known companies too. You don't have to take his word for it: a decade of public GitHub commits across the MongoDB EF Core Provider, Atom and Elastic LINQ is there to read.

He cares about the detail at both ends. Polished user interfaces at one end, well-designed infrastructure and security at the other — proven as security lead across xbox.com, and at Lloyds TSB Private Banking, where he delivered the first internet banking solution for Temenos Globus.

He thinks like a user. He co-created Microsoft's first fluent API, Code First for Entity Framework, in 2011 as part of a three-person team. Every application he delivers starts from the users' goals and the clearest, most efficient way to meet them, and people love the result.

He builds for a hand-off. An application should be maintainable by the person who picks it up, so his projects ship well documented, with detailed API docs and operations guides where they're needed, and nobody is left scratching their head.

At Intracia he runs engineering and operations — the application itself, the infrastructure it runs on, and consults for clients in a variety of areas.

In his own words

I started coding on a ZX Spectrum as a young teen, learning BASIC and Z80 assembly, and went straight from school into banking systems on large IBM machines. In 2000 I co-founded Contract 5, now C5 Alliance, where I built three internet banking solutions for Lloyds TSB offshore and grew the development team to around 12 people.

Microsoft came calling in 2008, and I moved to Redmond to work on LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, then as a senior engineer on the Xbox Marketplace and security lead across xbox.com. In 2011 I moved to the Bay Area to join Netflix, working on the Silverlight player and building their Windows 8 app.

From there I co-created a Silicon Valley start-up delivering for Xbox Entertainment Studios, Microsoft and Western Digital. Later I worked on the Atom editor at GitHub, where I headed up the Atom IDE initiative, and was a principal engineer on authentication SDKs at Auth0. Most recently I've written and maintained the official Entity Framework Core provider for MongoDB and developed Intracia.

I live on the island of Guernsey with my wife Kerry and our two children.