Hello MVMers, meet Conor O’Neill. A new member and our featured GTKYFS.
Where were you born? / Where did you grow up?
I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia – it’s a small city in the mountains of BC. It has a very similar climate to the Tahoe area.
Where did you go to school/college?
I studied Engineering at University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.
What jobs/career have you had after college?
Most of my career has been writing software that runs on embedded computers and helps them adapt to different uses. Does anyone remember BlackBerry smartphones? That was my first job out of college. One of the very first things I did was work on the software for the keyboard, so if you ever typed on one of those physical keyboards that was me! I worked there until 2014, when I came down to California to work at Nest (the fancy thermostat company). These days I work at a drone delivery company called Wing – we operate a fleet of drones that can deliver small items like food to people, and I help write the software that runs on the airplanes and makes them fly.
What is a fun fact (or two or three) about you that we wouldn’t know?
I love taking advantage of all the nature we have around us here in the Bay Area. My wife and I have a wild toddler at home so we don’t get a chance to go out as much as we used to, but we still try to spend time hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains and going to the beaches whenever we can. I use those outings as an excuse to practice landscape photography – I’ve been building a collection of landscape photographs that we’ve visited since moving to California. I also love spending time in the kitchen, cooking different types of food.
How long have you been swimming at MVM?
I’m pretty new. I just started swimming at MVM in January. Before then I used to swim at Google, and for a while during the pandemic I was doing open water swimming in the Foster City Lagoon. I only really started swimming seriously 4 or 5 years ago – before then I could barely make it across the pool. So still lots to learn!
I’m attaching two pictures – one with swim gear and one without so people can recognize me in and out of the pool.
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