About

This is where I say some nice things about myself

Hi, I’m Justin O’Conner. I’m a card-carrying nerd of the highest order. To be a nerd is to be passionate about something, and I’m very passionate about quite a few things. In my personal life, I love video games, D&D, writing music, tinkering with harebrained uses for my Raspberry Pi, and drinking craft beer. In my professional life, I’m an enthusiastic software architect striving to make systems more efficient and more effective, all while hopefully learning from the best and sharing my experiences with my teammates.

This site is my sparingly-used blog, where I write both semi-professional articles on relevant topics within the industry and random pieces on topics I personally care about. I believe that writing about something—especially something as intangible as software development philosophy—helps you understand it on a deeper level. That’s why you’ll find me writing about anything from the state of hiring in the industry to how Dependency Injection is confusing for newer developers. I also hope to eventually link to all my personal projects and open source contributions from this site.

My driving aspiration—and my contribution to the world—is to create software that people enjoy. I picked up my first programming book (on C++) when I was 13 intending to learn how to write games. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, and starting a game studio was my life’s goal during my formative years. So far, game development has remained a hobby; all of my professional experience is in more traditional software engineering and systems architecture. That said, I find the two domains to be more similar than people like to admit, and I fully believe they could learn a few things from one another.

Today, I am intensely focused on taking my unique perspective on development into companies where I can make a legitimate impact. I want to bring a business-minded, sensible approach to software engineering, while keeping my eye on the prize through the practice of careful, measured architecture and solid design. I strive to be the guy the company counts on to lead long-term projects into maintainable, on-time solutions.