Dan Marsden
Community Development Manager at Catalyst IT
Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDan Marsden is a seasoned Moodle specialist and community-focused software developer with over 17 years of hands-on experience building and maintaining core learning-platform features. As Community Development Manager at Catalyst IT and a long-term Moodle contributor since 2004, he leads maintenance of the SCORM activity and Plagiarism APIs and reviews third-party plugins as a Plugin Guardian. He blends deep back-end PHP expertise with security and data-integrity improvements—evident in his refactors and PHP7 upgrades for the questionnaire module and numerous SCORM fixes in the official Moodle repo. A repeated Google Summer of Code mentor, he also brings experience mentoring students to production-quality contributions, helping bridge community-driven development and enterprise needs. Based in Christchurch, New Zealand, he combines institutional knowledge of Moodle’s evolution with a knack for pragmatic, defensible fixes that reduce vulnerabilities and improve maintainability.
17 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
University of CanterburyMiddleton Grange School
Github Skills (8)
php10
javascript10
moodle10
back-end-development10
security10
database-design9
mysql8
sql8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
moodle/moodle
Mar 2009 - Oct 2022
Moodle - the world's open source learning platform
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:909 commits in 13 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily contributed to the Moodle SCORM module, focusing on implementing and improving functionality related to SCORM packages. Their work involved setting window.opener to null in multiple JavaScript files within the SCORM player, improving activity completion, fixing database errors, and addressing AICC pre-requisite handling. The user also modified the force new attempts setting and made several other updates related to SCORM functionality.
moodle
PoetOS/moodle-mod_questionnaire
Apr 2012 - Sep 2015
Questionnaire module for Moodle - Contributed module
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 2 PRs, 16 comments in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily focused on refactoring and improving the questionnaire module's back-end logic. Their contributions included implementing security best practices by incorporating sesskey checks on form submissions, and cleaning up data handling by removing reliance on deprecated functions. The user also made several DML improvements. They addressed vulnerabilities in the code, improved data integrity, and enhanced overall maintainability and the PHP 7 standard.
moodle
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