DANIEL WILLIAM CLARKE
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I’m a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer with over a decade of experience, and a fledgling business owner, combining technical expertise and leadership skills honed while guiding teams of up to seven engineers. I specialize in cloud computing, microservices, asynchronous architecture, and observability. My career has spanned a diverse range of projects, from cloud-based software and engaging games to intricate simulations and user-centric websites. Currently, I hold the position of Senior Software Engineer at Loveholidays, the fastest-growing travel agency in the UK, applying my skills to a new and exciting domain 🛫.
Alongside my full-time role, I run The Sauce Forge, my side business where I channel my passion for crafting unique hot sauces and related products. I’ve built the entire brand from the ground up, utilizing Next.js, Contentful, and Stripe to power a seamless website and checkout experience. Navigating business setup, FSA regulations, and crafting a product line from homegrown ingredients is a challenge I embrace with enthusiasm. My journey with The Sauce Forge is not just about creating great flavors, but also about applying my engineering skills to build a customer-centric, innovative brand.
Outside of my professional work, I enjoy spending my time doing any of the following:
👨👩👧 Being the best dad I can be is my foremost interest
🌶️ Growing my own Chillies, and fermenting my own hot sauces, sauerkrauts and Kimchi
🥙 Cooking new and interesting meals for my family
🦀 Learning the Rust programming language
🤖 Building Gunpla
🐍 Caring for my snake Scaramouche
Crafting fermented hot sauces and condiments. Selling direct at local farmers markets and fairs as well as directly online.
Joined Freetrade as a Software Engineer working to grow Freetrade's user base beyond 1 million users and drive subscriptions.
Graduate engineer contributing to building a cloud-native training simulator called OilSim for the Oil and Gas industry. Successfully delivered a scalable micro-frontend-based dashboard accommodating up to 400+ OilSim users. Utilized JavaScript, PHP, RequireJS, Composer, Grunt, and MariaDB to create a fully configurable management tool for OilSim simulations, catering to diverse user needs.
Designed and manufactured fibreglass models and tools for bespoke prototype car bodies, primarily for Morgan Motors.
Studied a range of A-Level subjects gaining access to study at university
Senior Software Engineer at loveholidays, playing a pivotal role in building loveholidays' cutting edge Search Platform, allowing customers to surface 1 trillion offers in seconds.
Full-stack engineer working across multiple high-visibility strategic data platform teams, moving from cloud seismic processing infrastructure through to the GAIA cloud marketplace organisation. Progressively took on more leadership responsibility including leading a multi-disciplinary team across Houston, Mexico and Pune.
Key achievements:
Tech: Java, Spring Boot, Golang, C++, TypeScript/Angular, Python, GCP (Compute Engine / PubSub), Kubernetes, Docker, DDD, SCRUM.
A 14-month internship, primarily responsible for the development of a simulation and software integration test platform designed to validate prototype research algorithms, physics models, and commercial Schlumberger products.
BSc (Hons) Computer Science BCS accredited course, I achieved the second highest grade of my cohort in my final year, graduating with a First with Honours
To complete my final year at Nottingham Trent University, I researched and developed an application capable of the generation and deployment of semi-autonomous supervisory controllers for general process automation. Upon completion I returned to Schlumberger Gould Research where I demonstrated my projects capabilities, driving a physical miniature drilling rig using a supervisory controller generated by my project, running against the drilling simulation platform I originally worked on during my internship.
The Sauce Forge is my side business, a start up bringing our line of home crafted hot sauces to the market, selling direct at farmers markets and craft fairs and direct online, we are building a grass roots following on social media. This project blends multiple passions of mine; hot sauces and technical expertise.
I’ve built the brand from the ground up, crafting unique recipes and creating a professional, fully configurable and responsive website powered by Next.js, Contentful, and Stripe, instrumented and observed with New Relic and secured with Cloudflare Turnstile. This platform ensures a seamless user experience, from exploring products to secure, custom-built checkout.
Beyond flavor, I’ve navigated the complexities of business setup and FSA regulations, ensuring every bottle meets safety and quality standards. From homegrown ingredients to bold branding and strategic marketing via Kit, The Sauce Forge represents my dedication to flavor, craftsmanship, and a customer-first approach.
Dem Shish is a local business with multiple restaurant locations in the south east of England, They host an excellent dining experience offering delicious Turkish and Mediterranean cuisine. I was asked to redesign their websites (demshish.co.uk and demshishcrawley.co.uk) to refresh that online presence and branding. I worked closely with the owners and business manager to craft the experience they envisioned. Using Wix, I created a modern, user-friendly experience that showcases their food, events, and services. This included integrating OpenTable’s booking widget, adding a splash screen for location selection on their flagship website, and refreshing their brand assets for a cohesive look across all platforms.
The Crawley Down Monday Club needed a modern, secure website to replace their outdated WordPress site. I rebuilt it from scratch using NextJS and Contentful CMS, creating a fast, user-friendly, and fully configurable platform. I redesigned and upscaled all their existing design assets—logos, banners, and more—to ensure they are performant and scalable across both desktop and mobile devices.
Security was a top priority since this website would be utilised by potentially vulnerable people: I removed personal information about the committee and implemented communication between visitors and club committee members via configurable forms secured by Cloudflare Turnstile, ensuring that member and volunteer request emails sent via Resend are genuine.
To track web performance and engagement, I instrumented the site with New Relic and Google Analytics. The result is a polished, secure, and easily manageable website that reflects the club’s values and meets modern web standards.
Initially born out of a 3 day hackathon project that I proposed and led, this booking visualiser was taken from proof of concept to production, and is now displayed full time on loveholidays' London office main lobby.
The frontend visualisation is a NextJS app, is underpinned by an async distributed architecture. Composed of a service built in Rust subscribing to a Google PubSub topic, fed real time booking event data, generated the moment a customer books with loveholidays via RudderStack. Events are processed, integrated, saved to Redis and finally emitted via a WebSocket server to any connected frontends, the entire pipeline allows a booking to be visualised within milliseconds.
The globe is a p5JS sketch, that renders customer journeys that have been booked across multiple points of sale. The main focus for the app was to optimize for its performance and memory footprint, while maintaining the fidelity required to visualise the scale of bookings made with loveholidays.
Ongoing indie space shooter project I am building in my spare time using C++ and SFML, Based on my first year university programming class project submission.
This time building the software using SOLID software engineering principles, safe memory management, as well as incorporating game development software design patterns such as spatial partitioning, finite state management and entity component systems.
I have made this Portfolio's code available for all to see!
This Portfolios backend service is written in Rust 🦀, encapsulating a Contentful CMS Client API, and the front end is implemented using React, React-PDF, P5JS, and Bootstrap.
Proof of concept to realise: How to incorporate non intrusive implicit logging containing request context data into an existing REST service. Investigate how to capture and store request data via middleware and access it via auto-wired services. As well looking into setting up an Open Telemetry, Loki, Grafana, Tempo and Prometheus observability stack to aggregate and visualise logs. The main aim of the POC was to produce several NestJS Modules that could be lifted and shifted for use in other projects
The main aim of this project was to develop a system capable of the generation of semi-autonomous supervisory controllers for general process automation. These controllers employed a primarily autonomous finite state machine as their underlying control agent, that would process real time data to determine the state and issue commands to control the system under supervision, while also allowing human intervention to supersede the controller’s decisions where safely available.
The finite state machine was generated by parsing a custom developed mark-down language that would be written by the user, and generated at runtime using algorithms based on classical finite state machine construction methods, used primarily in the field of lexical analysis.
The controller would allow user intervention via a procedurally generated a user interface implemented using SFML and would perform monitoring and issue commands using OPC protocols
A predator / prey simulation that utilises some rudimentary NLP based AI to test whether prey entities can survive for longer if they communicate.
This project was originally build during a group assignment during my university days, I have recently re-found the code, put it in a Github repo to save it from being lost again and began to resurrect the code base. Starting by swapping out the original graphics renderer for SFML and taking a stab at understanding and refactoring the surprisingly well put together code base!
Everything else on my Github. Here I put all small projects, technical challenges and proofs of concepts I work on from time to time.
In my youth I was a budding digital artist, All of my works are available to view on DeviantArt!
I have worked with and are proficient with a large variety of programming languages, frameworks, databases and tools. For backend web services I use Kubernetes, Terraform, Rust and TypeScript. For frontend; NextJS and React, and for performant apps, services and games I use C++, Golang or Rust.
I feel most at home with C++, TypeScript and Rust. I am also trying seek the path to true enlightenment by trying to learn Zig 🧘
Below is a selection of the technologies I have had experience with during my career so far, along with my perceived competency with each 🧠.
Skills and technologies I am currently using, learning and building experience with
Skills and technologies I enjoy working with the most, coming back to them again and again!
Everything else that I have had experience with during my career and personal projects so far
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