Adam O'Connor

About Me

This page is an overview of who I am, my experience as an IT professional, and the values that mean a lot to me.

As a youngster I started coding as a hobby on the Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Apple II c, e, gs. This interest led me to code by trade in 1996. Throughout my career, I have worked for corporate, collegiate, and government institutions through roles ranging from developer to project and organizational management.

The majority of projects I've worked on have been start-ups. My primary talent is taking ideas and turning them into full production stacks and building the team to run them.

In addition to my profession, I am a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a proud U.S. Navy veteran.

How I Work

Kindness & Respect    In regards to the people I work with - what matters most to me is treating each other with kindness and respect. I have learned that communicating and having an open mind make work fun and productive.

Stability    I am dedicated and therefore only want to work for stable companies, teams, & projects. Like you, I have responsibilities and it can be distracting having to worry about providing versus being focused on a cool feature.

Transparency    I like to see and understand how things work. Likewise, my confidence is stronger when I know everyone involved is on the same page. Transparency allows a group to work in truth and think as one.

Results-Oriented    Adult daycare frustrates me. Unfortunately it's very commonplace. I believe in a ROWE and have not found a more productive environment.

Work History

Swich.com - Chief Technology Officer & Privacy Officer 2019-Present
Swich is our new adventure. It's a culinary wellness app that is built around a choose your own path concept. We help people by where they want to go from a culinary perspective. It's really cool because the more a person goes down their path the more we're able to help them by recommending techniques, recipes, and groups to support them on their journey. This, like Rouxbe, is another high nutrition movement as we really are helping people improve their lives. I'm especially excited about this one because we have an awesome team and a very modern stack. Since this was a green pasture project, we have been able to pick the best tech for each feature.

Rouxbe.com - Chief Technology Officer & Privacy Officer 2014-Present
This is my current home and the newest addition to my family. Rouxbe is the webs dominant online cooking school with an emphasis on wellness. I love working at Rouxbe not just for the people I work with but for the subject matter and how it helps people. This is the first company I've worked for where the focus is on a person's quality of life vs. profit. Even though I've been at Rouxbe for a while now I still can't shake that honeymoon feeling of working for a fresh company and new material.

Contactability.com - Independent Contributor 2011-2013
I love Contactability because it is a SaaS currently for the lead generation industry. This was a fun platform to build because of that excitement one gets from working on a green pasture project. While getting Contactability off the ground I lived on-site Monday-Thursdays and slept on a cot in a cubicle camp I setup (remember I said I was dedicated). Currently, Contactability/SmartFinancial is doing quite well and becoming a leader in the industry.

InsuranceAgents.com - Independent Contributor 2011-2012
I was an individual contributor for InsuranceAgents.com (IA) mainly helping out with their Ruby apps. IA was a mix of Perl and Ruby - the former holding a large backend presence. IA was a big data company with a lot of high-performance systems that required the highest reliability - minutes of being down were strongly felt. IA did really well and was eventually acquired by Bankrate.com. By the time of the acquisition, I had already been working on a new project that would become the subsequent start-up Contactability.com.

Trail10.com - Owner 2010-Present
After leaving MT I formed Trail10 to organize my contracting career. Trail10 has led me to some cool people and projects. I mainly provide fractional leadership services but also work on light to medium size coding projects.

MachineTools.com - Chief Technology Officer 2005-2011
MT brought me back into the start-up world. It was stable, active, and a family. At first the subject matter was foreign to me but eventually got into it. We underwent a large project of migrating a 10yo monster stack into Ruby on Rails and launched without a hitch. I really grew at MT and it's where I first made CTO. As CTO of MachineTools.com I managed an onshore team as well as offshore teams in India and Russia.

Misc. SaaS Applications & Services - Owner 2001-2014
During this period I had built out various SaaS services and in some cases partnered up with specialists in the field. I did this mainly as a way to try new entrepreneurial ideas but also to experiment with technology. Highlights were a HIPPA document service, a home inspection platform, and a medical assets marketplace.

Government & Corporate Gigs - Software Developer 2001-2005
Once the dot com bubble popped I landed in school => military => corporate life.

SoulIntegration.com - Head of Engineering 1997-2001
Artificial Intelligence was the focus of Soul Integration. We primarily created custom intranets but also specialized in the automation of whatever we could get our hands on (store, construction company, automotive inventory, etc.).

IOS Communications - Software Developer 1996-1997
I built and maintained websites for IOS which was one of the town's ISPs. IOS was unique because we used an early proprietary hypertext preprocessor which allowed us to create complex dynamic websites, CMS, and web apps.