Conference Bio

Clare is an independent consultant, helping teams work sustainably and efficiently to test and refactor legacy and hard-to-test code. She has worked in software development for over 30 years, and in C++ and Qt for 20 years, and is now branching out to other languages.

Since 2017, Clare has used her spare time to work remotely with Llewellyn Falco on ApprovalTests.cpp, to radically simplify testing of legacy code.

She has enjoyed this so much that in 2019 she set up Clare Macrae Consulting Ltd, to focus even more on helping others work with legacy code.

Before this, Clare was a Principal Scientific Software Engineer at Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. She is the original author of their popular C++ and Qt-based 3D crystal structure visualisation program Mercury.

Clare loves the challenge of helping developers add tests for seemingly untestable and unmaintainable code.

She says that she sees conference talks as a chance to share things she now has the space to learn, and wishes she had known about years ago.

When not working and contributing to open source, Clare volunteers with the “#include <C++>” diversity and inclusion organisation, and enjoys walking, cycling and folk music.