about me...
Hi, I’m Alan Hemmings. I’m a C# software engineer, cloud architect, and technical leader with over 20 years of experience in finance, retail, banking, and cloud computing. My focus is on building high-performance distributed systems, exploring Cloudflare Edge solutions, and working on full-stack projects, both as an engineer and a technical lead.
Recent roles have taken me to Christie’s Auction House, Blackdot Solutions, ClearBank, BNP Paribas, Insight Investment, Tesco PLC, Pearson plc and Juddmonte Farms Ltd to create or work on mission-critical applications. I’m also an open-source contributor, former user group founder, and a big believer in BDD and quality-driven development.
✅ Software Architecture & Engineering
Hands-on engineering: I often work as a senior C# developer or technical lead using Agile practices. My career interests are around simplifying the building and testing of high transaction data intensive applications. (And often, making the
untestable
testable, working with legacy code.)Agile ceremonies: I have helped and am happy to assist clients with agile ceremonies and have on a few occasions stepped in as interim scrummaster when a full time agile coach or scrummaster was not avaiable.
Polyglot approach: While I mainly work with C# .NET on and typescript on Azure for client contracts, I’m comfortable with a range of modern languages and enjoy exploring new tools.
✅ Hobies and interests
In my early career I did a brief bit of industrial (embedded) process control development and have kept an interest in IOT devices.
✅ Open-Source
Contributions: I maintain and contribute to open-source projects, including Goblinfactory.Konsole, Memstate, Nue.js and others.
I maintain an open-source .NET console library called Goblinfactory.Konsole
... which provides structured console output and advanced features for building console applications. It’s gained over 700 GitHub stars and has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, an encouraging sign that developers find it genuinely useful. I take particular pride in the library’s robust test coverage and code quality, which reflect my commitment to writing clean, maintainable software.
✅ Developer Community Advocate
In 2009, I founded the Cambridge Developer’s User Group (Camdug), organising and hosting over 120 events between 2009 and 2016. I stopped running Camdug in 2017 when I started contracting full time in London.
Snowcode: I also organised the developer conference “Snowcode,” running popular week long developer conferences in the Alps from 2010 till 2015.
✅ Travel, motorbikes and snow
When I’m not coding, I love motorbike touring and try to get out to snowboard in the Alps (Morzine and Val-d'Isère) with other developers and friends of snowcode at least once a year.
