Hi! I'm Connor.
Fullstack Developer based in
Minnesota.
My Background.
Born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, I didn't
find my passion for web development until I was an
undergrad student at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 2017.
In a software engineering class, my group leveraged
Angular for our group project to build a social media
app for teachers. I picked up Angular by watching
YouTube tutorials, reading documentation, and
experimenting with classmates. I was hooked.
Since
then, I've had the privilege of
working
with diverse and global teams, and large and small
projects, with opportunities to learn from experts in
areas such as system design, data modelling,
application development, and security. I'm
fortunate to have been able to design and develop
applications that serve the Manufacturing, Healthcare,
and Energy industries.
I'm currently
employed by
DNV, where I am working on a team to build software that
ultimately helps accelerate the clean energy
transition. Specifically, my team provides energy
efficiency analytics and tooling to utilities around
the US. I feel fortunate to be working on projects
that are directly intended to combat
climate change. I'm driven by a deep appreciate
for life on earth.
Some of my favorite technologies for data
engineering and application development include SQL,
Python, Docker, TypeScript, React.js, and Node.
My Projects.
Web development is fascinating to me because the
internet is an amazing place, and it allows me to
bring my ideas to the world. Along with that, it
challenges me, and even serves as one of my favorite
creative outlets.
Here are a some of the
passion projects that I'm most proud of working
on. These range across a wide-variety of
tech-stacks, and the ideas for them have usually
been inspired by the people or things in my life
around me.
I enjoy pushing boundaries
with my designs, and emphasizing scalability during
implementation. Oftentimes I choose to embrace new
technologies and adopt the latest industry standards
when I embark on new projects.
Prana
Next.js Fullstack Development
Plants, animals, ecosystems, and life in general has fascinated me since I can remember. Prana is a project I started with a goal of bringing greater visibility to the sharp decline in biodiversity that we are experiencing around our planet. On the backend, the data is a consolidation of 20+ open-source and trusted data sources from around the world, spanning domains such as Biodiversity, Emissions, Weather, and Energy. On the frontend, I'm using Next.js to bring this data to life via tables, charts, and maps. It has been a great opportunity for me to learn Mapbox, a modern JavaScript library for buildling interactive mapping experiences in the web.
Studio City
Adobe XD and React Native UI
Studio City is a passion project I started in 2022 to learn mobile app development with React Native. It challenged me to think about how to design a user-friendly app that is modern and performant. I began using Adobe XD to build a working mockup that I could demo on my iPhone. I built the front-end using React Native, and UI Kittens was the component and style language I primarily used. I wrote about my experience on Medium here, and the source code is available publicly on GitHub.
Indie Culture
GraphQL API Development
This API was designed to serve data to a front-end social media app, called Indie Culture. It was implemented with GraphQL as the query language, Prisma for database access, and Node.js as the runtime. It supports all of the core features that an API for an app like Twitter would need. GraphQL is an interesting alternative to REST, because it provides type saftey, and allows for more precise control over how much data is requested by client apps. This API can be forked and further customized to quickly build an API that is fit for most any social media app.
I have experience building data pipelines for
billion-record datasets. Modelling data for
different purposes such as reporting tools, web, and
mobile clients.
My design philosophy is inspired by the natural
world, where components are highly interactive and
feel alive. Tailwind is currently my preferred css
library.
I've worked on apps simple and complex, web and mobile, internal and external. I learn into rigorous design patterns and pushing logic left.
My Favorite Free Creative Resources for Front-End Developers
I think most would probably agree that googling things and tapping into developer communities is a key part of being an effective developer — regardless of whether you’ve been coding for 5 months, or 5 years. When you have millions of smart people sharing resources, it makes a lot of sense to learn from them whenever possible. Beyond just leveraging google, there are tons of free tools and services at the finger tips of developers nowadays. When it comes to front-end development, I wanted to share some resources that I use a lot to help expand my own creative boundaries.
My Blog.
UI Kitten 5.0 Technical Review
If you’re getting started on a new mobile project and React Native is your technology of choice (Flutter is an emerging alternative for cross-platform development), picking a component library or UI framework can be a daunting task. The goal of this article isn’t necessarily to sway you one way or another on this decision making process. I highly recommend reading about other popular UI frameworks such as NativeBase, React Native Elements, Shoutem, Teaset, etc. The list goes on and on. I can’t honestly say that I believe there’s a clear front-runner in this space, given that I’ve only really used UI Kitten. What I can do, and plan to use the remainder of this article to do, however, is give a detailed explanation of what I took into consideration before choosing UI Kitten for my mobile project, and how that is going for me so far.
