About me, Connor Sullivan

I'm a senior software engineer based in Toronto, Canada. Interests include geopolitics, minimalism, long distance running, virtual power, and raining triples on my enemies in basketball. I used to play guitar but I live in a condo now so that's on hold.

Experience

Octopus Energy (2020 to present)

I currently work on the US-based domestic asset integrations team, which is a fancy term for the team that connects with customer residential energy assets such as home batteries, solar panels, and EVs. We then abstract them behind a virtual power plant API consumable by electricity system operators. When I lived in the UK, I worked for the core optimisation team which used Python and it's myriad of data science libraries the find the mathematically optimal way to dispatch and control the aforementioned assets. By mathematically optimal, I mean most profitable 🤭.

Limejump (2018 to 2020)

My first job after moving to the UK, Limejump is an award-winning pioneer in the virtual energy space. I lead the billing team, responsible for aggragating customer contract and meter data, then crunching the numbers into a sendable invoice. In 2019, I did a secondment as an Energy Trader at our in-house energy trading desk, where I traded power from our commissioned energy assets on the EPEX intraday and day-ahead energy markets. Also in 2019, Limejump was acquired by Shell and incorporated into the Shell New Energies department, which coincidentally was the day I discovered my love of employee option grants.

Grantbook (2015 to 2018)

Grantbook is a boutique tech consultancy and certified B Corp that provides tech advisory and implementation serves to the desparately underserved non-profit sector. As their first software developer, I was tasked with plugging technological gaps between the existing enterprise software solutions with custom code in Python and/or Javascript. Highlights include a custom Zapier plugin for a popular GMS (Grant Management System) and a payments processing system that turned bank files from the stone age into cold, hard cash to grant recipients for a prominent Chicago-based foundation.

Education

I have a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Economics and minor in Math from McGill University. Entering university I wanted to be a lawyer, but after reading my first apartment lease I decided to find a career path that wouldn't make me want to kill myself. After taking courses in nearly everything, I discovered that that I liked dealing with numbers and that I was good at programming.

In 2022, I became an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate. Which means given any problem I can find the solution with the absolute maximum AWS vendor lock-in.

Projects

BirdDave

For my bird photographer father's 70 birthday, I made him a simple web application to upload, categorize, and display his bird photos. I used Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and SST to deploy it to AWS. I made the whole thing from scratch, which in retrospect was a mistake since my design skills are terrible. In true agile fashion, I'll add new features once he requires them, which will be probably be never because his baby boomer soul rejects new technology like an organ transplant.