About Me

Hello, I’m Mark Rendle and, if you’re here, you must be looking to find out some stuff about me. I am a software developer, consultant, trainer, conference speaker, tech writer, and occasional musician.

Sounds like a lot? After 30 years in the industry, 22 of those working with .NET, I’ve got a lot of experience and a willingness to share it with as many people as possible.

I have been a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies several years and prior to that was an MVP for Azure. The MVP Award is given to people who provide value to the developer community, and MVPs have close relationships with people inside Microsoft that help them to do that even better.

Also, I’ve just been recognised as one of the top “Social Influencers for Open Source” in the UK in the OpenUk 2023 New years honours list. I think this is pretty cool. I am a big fan of Open Source and you can track down some of my earlier work/successes such as Simple Data (link).

I live in the UK but have travelled extensively in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia speaking at large and small conferences, running workshops and providing consultancy. I am also set up to offer all of these services virtually and managed to support many of my ongoing commitments during the COVID pandemic. I spoke at DEVIntersection in Las Vegas over Zoom, and delivered several workshops and talks for virtual conferences. I am open to most opportunities, small or large; even a short amount of time working through an issue with a professional can lead to solutions.

In the time I have left when I’m not doing all of that, I tinker with ways to improve and innovate within the tech sector, looking for ways to optimise our existing technology or manage the transitions the tech sector goes through. For example, I created Visual ReCode, an extension for Visual Studio that helps programmers convert WCF applications to gRPC.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once earned a living as a stand-up comic where, besides being pathetically grateful that it didn’t cost as much to live back then, I learnt how to “work a room”. This translates into a confident speaker, happy to address hundreds of people, giving keynote speeches which are both humorous and educational. And this comedy training also taught me the much harder skill of winning over and maintaining the enthusiasm of a smaller group of people. This means I can teach a two day technical workshop on dry-sounding topics like API design or .NET performance in a relaxed atmosphere well-suited to learning.

Despite my age and creaky joints, I am pretty agile and offer bespoke training workshops or speeches to suit your specific needs alongside my existing repertoire of talks and workshops - which, in the nature of all things technical, are constantly being updated anyway.

Many people will have heard of me through my keynotes on “The Worst Programming Language Ever” or “Programming’s Greatest Mistakes” but I do also do proper technical talks on a variety of topics.

You can also commission me to write a book. I may one day get around to finishing my own but, in the meantime, here’s a link to an e-book I was asked to write by Microsoft: gRPC for WCF Developers.

What else to tell you…I have 2 children both of whom have given their own talks at Conferences or helped me with mine. Making programming accessible to the young is important to me - I would love to find the time to resume streaming on Twitch or YouTube making silly bits of software while anyone who wants to can watch me learning new things.

Slightly dry list of technical skills

·       Frameworks: ASP.NET Core, MVC, Web API, Blazor & gRPC; .NET Core

·       Languages: C#, TypeScript, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, SQL, Python

·       Databases: SQL Server (2000 to 2019 + SQL Azure, SSIS, SSRS); PostgreSQL; MySQL; MongoDB; CosmosDB

·       Cloud: Docker; Kubernetes; Microsoft Azure; Amazon Web Services.

·       Platforms: Windows; Linux/Unix; macOS.

·       Buzzwords: microservices; CI/CD; API design; Observability/Metrics;  TDD/BDD; Agile