About

I'm a software developer and have been now professionally for over 20+ years and love what I do. I live in Guernsey with with my wife Katie and are kept on our toes by our 3 kids. Living on a small island you can't not love the sea. I try to throw myself in it as often as possible - less so in the winter! I try to stay fit with misc outdoorsy stuff. Guernsey is a beautiful island with some stunning cliff paths to run, and coastal roads to cycle and getting out to explore is as good for the mind as it is for the body. Nb. The fitness drive is largely to counteract the beer, wine and curries. I also love those!

Professional(-ish)

I co-founded Cortex back in 2018 (with Matt). At Cortex we have a growing portfolio of products that you can check out over here and am fortunate enough to work with some awesome people. It is very much a company melded together with a common set of values that Matt and I share. We love technology and using it to solve interesting problems. We try our best to keep up wtih everything and have grown Cortex with like-minded individuals which collectively, makes keeping up a whole lot easier as one of us can grok it and share it.

Oh my dear god, how long

I’ve been tinkering with the codes since taking delivery of an Acorn Electron, erm, many years ago, in the 80’s, not saying which bit. I still love the tech and relentlessly trying to keep up with it all!

I’ve always loved to develop games and like many developers was their route in to development. I started out developing crude text adventures on the Acorn, platform games in the STOS game engine on the Atari ST, and then moved on to the PC (well, more recently Mac). Game Dev scratches an itch that doesn’t get scratched by some of the more serious work that gets done at “work”.

Together with Jase Magee (also from Cortex), we co-founded Granite Games and have (very) slowly been releasing games together.

Like many geeks, I have fanboyed various and numerous console and computer systems over the years. These kind of shape and define us. Mine are chronicled below (don’t judge me - we were all young once)…

… I would like to say that I have grown up now, but what has really happened is that I now have an income and can afford to buy most gaming devices as they come out, so don’t have to pick a side. Alas this has also coincided with having no time at all to play them.

marcbeavan.com

This site has been created in Hugo which I think is pretty awesome. This is the second incarnation. The first used a theme plucked from the Hugo themes page, and this, the second one has been hand crafted. Why!? Well, so that I could get a better idea of how it all hangs together. It’s been good to fun diving in a bit deeper under the covers, albeit taken a month longer than I had planned. It is though lightweight, javascript free, tracking free and now understood and able to dance to whichever little tune I want it to. If I carve out some more time then I’ll create an open source repo and add it to the Hugo themes page.