Still curious. Still making things.
I’m Damian Hodgkiss. I started programming in 1995, and I’ve usually had something on the go ever since.
It started with a BBS.
My first programs were applications for bulletin board systems, written in Turbo Pascal. I was self-taught, working things out as I went. From there I moved into C on Linux, then graphical applications for Windows.
One of those was eFX, a tool for changing the look of Windows. It let people customise an interface they spent their days looking at. That project led to my first company and a website where people could upload and share their own software skins.
Looking back, that was an early version of something I still enjoy: an idea grows beyond the original piece of software. There’s the thing you build, then the experience around it—how people find it, use it, and make it their own.
A little every day.
3,496 contributions in the last 12 months
Windows skins, file sharing, and the web.
After eFX, I co-developed Napigator. If you remember the Napster era, it was a Windows utility that let people find and connect to different servers on the peer-to-peer network.
Windows customisation and file sharing might seem a long way from the things I work on now. But they were software projects with all the interesting details that come with making something people can actually use. An idea had to become an interface, and the interface had to do something useful.
By the mid-2000s, I was running a web development agency, building websites and applications for clients. The work had moved from the desktop into the browser, and from my own ideas to helping other people bring theirs to life.
A longer chapter in product engineering.
In 2013, I started working with the team at Sumo Group.
That has been a substantial part of my working life: contributing to products as part of a team, alongside the independent projects I’ve continued to explore.
Across all those years, the tools and languages have changed considerably. The part I enjoy has stayed fairly consistent. I like working through an idea, bringing the pieces together, and reaching the point where it works. Being able to step back and see something that used to exist only in your head is a satisfying feeling.
Some things of my own.
I also build independently through nineteen78.
I’m interested in the whole process. The design, the engineering, getting something live, explaining it, supporting it, and finding the people it might be useful to. Building your own products means getting involved in all of it.
I care about how those products look and feel, too. The experience of using something is part of what you’ve made, right alongside the code that makes it work.
There’s still plenty to learn.
AI has become part of how I build software. After decades of programming, it’s an interesting change in the day-to-day work: new ways to explore ideas and get things made, with plenty of decisions still needing a human eye.
I’ve also had a longstanding interest in application security—how systems work, where they break, and why. It’s one of the areas I’m spending more time learning about.
The tutorials on this site are another part of that process. I like learning something and being able to explain it to someone else. There are years of notes and guides here.
Away from the screen.
I listen to a lot of music, play tennis, and enjoy fishing. Tennis makes exercise feel like something other than exercise. Fishing is a chance to be out on the water, away from the internet for a while.
There’s usually another idea waiting when I get back.