TL;DR

Hi, I’m Mark Rendle. If you need to get in touch please try Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m up for speaking at conferences and user groups, doing podcasts, and any other fun stuff. I can also help your business adopt .NET Core with consulting and bespoke workshops.

The Bio

I’ve been programming since I was 9 years old, and getting paid to write code since I was 15, when somebody offered me £5 a go to write insurance sales reports in Superbase running on a Commodore 128.

I got my first full-time job just before my 17th birthday, where I learned Informix ESQL/C and 4GL, and developed the vi muscle-memory that will remain long after all my other faculties have faded into nothingness.

There was a brief period in the late 90s where I was a stand-up comic, even doing it for a living for a couple of years, but I never stopped fiddling with code and eventually quit stand-up and got back into software. No regrets.

When Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 came along, I switched to an unholy mixture of C/C++, Visual Basic and Gupta SQLWindows, until 2000, when Microsoft released the first public beta of C# and .NET. Since then I’ve worked mainly on the .NET stack, through Windows Forms and ASP.NET WebForms, WCF, WPF and MVC and Web API, and with .NET Core since it was first released as Project K in 2015. I guess you could say I’m a fan.

Obviously there’s been some of this new-fangled front-end development in there too, with various versions of Angular, and even some back-end JavaScript with Node.js. True story: I once created a production microservice with a very early preview version of .NET Core (when it was still ASP.NET 5) just to generate UUIDs for a Node service, which slowed down to about 10 requests/second if it tried to generate them itself.

In 2009 I started speaking at user groups and conferences, which I think the stand-up experience really helped with. I know a lot of people are terrified of public speaking, but when you’ve faced down the late show at Jongleurs Bow a room full of fellow geeks is not that scary. These days I’m lucky to be a regular speaker at big conferences like NDC, Build Stuff and QCon, and I occasionally do silly things with my friend Dylan Beattie and his band, The Linebreakers.

Right now I’m mostly interested in helping people get off the old .NET Framework and onto the vastly superior .NET Core. I’m working with Gibraltar Software on Visual ReCode, a tool for automatically migrating applications to .NET Core. It currently supports converting legacy WCF applications to gRPC for .NET Core, and upgrading WinForms and WPF projects, and there’s more coming in time for .NET 5. I also wrote a book, gRPC for WCF Developers (with a lot of help from the very talented Miranda Steiner).