Hey! I'm Dan 👋

My Prediction of the Software Engineering Landscape to Come The role of a software engineer is changing before our eyes. We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how software gets built—one where the primary skill isn’t writing code, but rather directing intelligent agents that write code for us. This isn’t some distant future. It’s happening now. And it’s reshaping what it means to be a software engineer. The Rise of Spec-Driven Development Traditional software development has followed a familiar pattern: product requirements are translated into technical specifications, which engineers then translate into code. This two-step translation process—from business need to technical spec, then from spec to implementation—has been the core of our profession. ...

The tools we use define how we work. As we step into 2026, I thought it would be interesting to document the technologies and tools that power my day-to-day development work. This is my current tech stack—a mix of familiar friends and exciting new additions. Programming Languages C# - My Reliable Companion C# remains my primary programming language and has been for years. There’s something incredibly satisfying about the robustness of the .NET ecosystem and the elegance of modern C#. Whether I’m building APIs, working with Entity Framework, or leveraging LINQ for data manipulation, C# continues to be my go-to language for getting things done. ...

In software engineering, there is often a tension between the reality of discovery and the rigidity of a roadmap. We are frequently handed a destination and an arrival time before we’ve even had a chance to check the engine. Right now, my team is in the thick of a significant integration with a complex third-party platform. The technical requirements are heavy: our APIs need to interact with theirs, and we need to upload all our sponsored campaigns to their platform to begin experimentation. ...

Intro On Friday the 18th of November I embarked on a journey to Luton for IBM’s first Hackathon for the Hyperledger fabric and Blockchain technology. My initial interest in this event came from my lecturer when I was approached by her, and she asked if I’d like to attend. It’s worth mentioning here that I’d never attended a hackathon before the weekend of the 18th, but I knew of what they were and I had been interested in attending one for a long while, so I was keen. Same kind of story for blockchain, I knew of the technology, I mean for anyone that’s heard of Bitcoin will also know of the term blockchain so this also sparked my interest. I think now would be a good time to explain a bit about the technologies that were involved during the hacakthon event for those that may be a bit in the dark at this point, so if you already know about Hyperledger and blockchain technologies feel free to scroll past the explanations. ...

As some of you reading this may or may not already know; over the past day or so I went from having the idea of creating a computer program that would essentially be able to play the popular arcade game Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, to actually developing it. Now as hard as this problem sounds, it was surprisingly easy and fairly swift to solve. I broke it down into three main steps: ...