Rory O'connell
Founder at One Ear Cat Studio
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRory O'Connell is a founder and seasoned software engineer with over two decades in technology and a 15-year track record of senior engineering and platform leadership. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he specializes in revitalizing and replacing legacy systems—having planned and executed large Rails upgrades, broken monoliths into services, and led zero-downtime rewrites that improved reliability and reduced infrastructure. A longtime Ruby/Rails advocate since the early 2000s, he combines deep runtime knowledge (including contributions to the mruby VM) with front-end polish and practical DevOps experience—containerizing services, moving infrastructure to Kubernetes, and introducing performance-driven tooling. Rory excels at joining teams, quickly mapping people and components, and taking ownership to drive pragmatic technical and organizational change. He has a founder’s mindset from startups to enterprise customers, and an uncommon talent for finding low-risk paths to retire brittle code while keeping products running.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Chemistry Biology Mathematics, Chemistry Biology Mathematics at University of Iowa
Github Skills (7)
memory-management10
javascript10
eslint10
c-programming10
glsl9
electron9
webgl9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
mruby/mruby
May 2020 - Sep 2020
Lightweight Ruby
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Systems Programmer
Back-end Developer / Systems ProgrammerContributions:45 commits, 10 PRs, 47 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Rory focused on improving the mruby runtime by addressing potential memory leaks and compiler-related issues. They added warnings for functions that could leak RProc objects and made several code modifications to work around optimization bugs in the Microsoft Visual C++ (MSC) compiler, specifically in the mruby-random gem. They also implemented and refined ObjectSpace methods like `memsize_of` and `memsize_of_all`, which required extensive understanding of the mruby VM internals, including memory allocation and object structures. This indicates a deep understanding of the mruby runtime's internal workings.
ruby
patriciogonzalezvivo/glslEditor
Nov 2017 - Dec 2017
Simple WebGL Fragment Shader Editor
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Rory primarily focused on improving the code quality and maintainability of the WebGL fragment shader editor. Their contributions involved fixing syntax errors identified by ESLint and applying whitespace fixes. Furthermore, they addressed compatibility issues related to camelCase changes and implemented error handling to enhance the robustness of the application.
electronwebglfragmentglsl-sandboxshaders
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