Simon OConnor

Simon O'Connor has a diverse work experience in various roles and industries. Simon started their career as a Software Engineer at the Defense Research Agency, where they worked during summers while attending university. Their role involved classified work and was sponsored by the Ministry of Defence.

After that, Simon joined Digital Domain as a Digital Artist, focusing on computer-generated imagery. Simon then moved to Walt Disney Animation Studios, where they worked as an Effects Animator for over a decade.

In 2008, Simon briefly freelanced as an Effects Animator at Cafe FX, contributing to the development of special effects for Night at the Museum 2. Simon used Maya software to animate the sailing ships in the paintings, employing cloth simulation techniques.

Simon's next venture was as the owner of Sicon Studios, where they developed custom websites for clients and subcontracted for design firms. Simon also created backends for various websites using multiple programming languages, such as Ruby on Rails and PHP.

Simon later joined Balihoo as a Senior Software Engineer, leading the development of the front-end application for the Balihoo platform. Initially implemented in Scala with the Play framework, the application was later rewritten using Coffeescript and Angular, running on Node.js. Simon also contributed to the development of local websites for companies like Jostens and Aflac while working with Balihoo's creative department.

From 2018 to 2020, Simon worked at Vacasa as a Senior Software Engineer, specializing in full-stack development. Simon utilized Python, ES6 Javascript, and AWS cloud technologies, including React, SASS, AWS Sam, DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway. Django and Wagtail were employed for the backend.

Most recently, Simon joined FlipRide as the Lead Engineer in 2020, further expanding their expertise and responsibilities in the field.

Simon O'Connor attended Imperial College London from 1990 to 1993. During this time, they pursued a Bachelor of Engineering with Honors degree in Computer Science.