About Me! | Connor Williams

Howdy, I'm Connor!

I'm a Sydney-based software engineer currently working at Canva! I enjoy good coffee, food, and a good chat. In my spare time, I like to watch anime and play video games when I'm indoors and play basketball when I'm outdoors. This is a blog for my ideas and a portfolio for the ones I make/do something with.
If you'd like to get in touch, reach out of one of the platforms in the header or you can email me.

Career Story

I've always wanted to work with computers. I remember spending time with my Dad at his work when I was young and being fascinated by it all. I was 4 or 5 when I shocked my Dad by installing a Monster's Inc PC game; that he hadn't wanted to install for me for some reason, all on my own - just from having seen him do it.

In early high school, I taught myself the very basics of Java by following tutorials on YouTube to make Minecraft mods and I was fluent and confident in Python by my senior year. I also worked developing several Unity projects to get my head around C# - my major IPT project was an app made in Unity to keep score of basketball games.

After school, I focused on developing as many side projects as I could; the original 2 versions of this website being one of them.

I look back and realise how many lessons I learned doing all those extra-curricular projects have prepared me to find comfort in not having the exact solution or answers right away and to be able to adapt as requirements shift - I call this being "professionally curious".

"Professionally curious"

I've been a curious person my entire life. I was that kid that always asked the adults "why?" whenever I was given an answer that most of the other kids just accepted with no issue.

As I've grown into my career, I've leveraged my heightened curiousity to enhance my understanding of not only the technical systems I support and develop daily, but to improve the business procedures and outcomes that my software supports.

It's essential to understand the right questions to ask and who to ask them to and that to me is what makes my curiosity "professional". I'm adept at identifying who knows what I don't and am able to translate highly-technical concepts into language they're most comfortable with.

Hobbies

Outside of work I spend my time across a handful of activities; including basketball, custom mechanical keyboards, video and tabletop games, and coffee.

Basketball

Organising a social group of players; including myself, for regular scrimmage matches before we join a social/semi-competitive league.

Currently a Lakers fan

Mechanical Keyboards

I've amassed a small collection of custom mechanical keyboards for difference purposes including

A Promise87 from Wuque Studios
A Link65 from Owlabs
A QK65 from Qwertykeys
A Keychron Q6 nicknamed "Jade Dragon" that I use in the office.
A Keychron Q3 nicknamed "Hollow Purple" that is my everyday not-at-work keyboard.
A Keychron Q10 that I use when I'm working from home.

Gaming

I learned to read playing Gameboy Advance games and I've been a gamer ever since. I started with a GBA and a PlayStation 2. These days I mostly play PC games but I do still play Pokémon and other classic Nintendo titles - they still make the best party games by far. Some of my all-time favourite games include Persona 5 Royal, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, and Yakuza 0.

Since 2022, I've been running my own Dungeons And Dragon campaign and have been slowly entering into the tabletop gaming space as I really appreciate the simplicity of a good board game and the creative outlet of telling a story in a collaborative medium like Dungeons and Dragons.