Daniel Masterson - About Me

Hi there! I’m Daniel Masterson, a software developer originally from Manchester and now based in Chorley, UK. I graduated from the University of Hull in 2017 with a first class MEng in Computer Science with Games Development, and I’ve been a Software Developer at Trident ever since.

By day I’m a full stack developer, building software for industrial printing and packaging, including pharmaceutical packaging with braille. By night (and most weekends), I’m a game developer. I co-run an indie studio, I’ve built my own game engine, and I’ve picked up a few game jam awards along the way.

Technical Skills

Languages

C# is my primary language, used across .NET and .NET Core for a wide variety of projects.
JavaScript and TypeScript, for both frontends and backends.
C, C++ and D.
SQL, with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite.
Currently learning Rust.

Web

ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core, including Blazor.
React and Preact, plus Astro and Next.js.
Svelte and AngularJS.
PHP.

Cloud & DevOps

Joint manager for CI/CD pipelines and general DevOps at Trident, using Azure DevOps.
Docker and Kubernetes.
Terraform.
The Azure ecosystem, including App Services, Azure Functions, Azure DNS, CDN and more.

Testing & Tooling

A big believer in unit testing, plus Playwright for end-to-end testing.
Git, SVN and TFVC, mostly on Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Games & Graphics

Game development in Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Source and custom engines.
Built a general purpose DirectX 11 game engine from scratch in C++.
OpenGL 4+ and DirectX 11+, and keen to learn Vulkan.
GLSL, HLSL and Cg for shaders, with an interest in GPGPU techniques.

Specialist Knowledge

Braille: I designed and built Trident’s braille translation system, which lets artists, customers and users type plain text and get correct braille for the target language. It supports both 6 and 8 dot braille across all European languages, plus Hebrew and Arabic, and will automatically apply language specific rules such as applying number and capitalization marker symbols, handling language specific contractions and special symbol sequence handling. This has handled automated pharmaceutical braille generation for the company since 2020. I also know the intricacies and complexities of Chinese, Japanese and Korean braille, which the system doesn’t support yet.
Web accessibility: WCAG, ARIA and screen readers. I’m the main champion for accessibility support across Trident’s systems.
Industrial printing: Detailed knowledge of the PDF format and its standards, along with fonts and colour systems and standards used in print.
Spoken languages: A decent grasp of German, and currently learning Japanese.

Projects

I’m the co-owner and primary developer of NovaDawn Studios. Nothing has shipped just yet, but a couple of projects are in the works: Exim, a story-driven murder mystery built in Godot, and NarraMark, a narrative-focused scripting language for writing branching dialogue. You can read about both on my Projects page.

Over the years I’ve also worked on plenty of personal projects, including Fragment Engine, my now-retired C++ game engine. I’ll be writing more about these on the blog in future.

Contact

Want to get in touch? You can find me on any of these:

I don’t publish my email address, as I already get more than enough spam. If you’d like it, send me a message on one of the above and I’ll happily share it.

Note: Any views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my current employer, NovaDawn Studios or any other organisation I am associated with.