About me

I'm Damien. Hand me a marker and a whiteboard and I'm happy: that's where my job actually happens. A problem walks in fuzzy, gets drawn, gets turned around and argued about, and walks out as a design someone can build. What I love most about working this way is that a good drawing talks to everyone. Around a whiteboard, the senior developer and the product owner point at the same boxes, and the conversation works with both.

I trained as a software designer and it never wore off. 15 years in, mostly on the backend, the roles have followed that bent: tech lead, technical referent, consulting architect. I write code to check that my designs survive reality, not the other way around.

Lately a lot of my whiteboard time goes to AI. I was into machine learning before LLMs made it everyone's topic, and now I'm trying to understand these tools deeply enough to build on top of them. I expect a good part of what comes next, for me, to happen there.

Off duty I play video games, almost only in VR. I print things in 3D, which is another way of watching a design become real. And I share my home with pet rats: clever little animals, criminally underrated.