Hi, my name is Conor! I've been writing software for about 15 years. I started in high school and ended up majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics at Haverford College in Philadelphia. In addition to studying CS in college, I worked as a software developer for the college library, writing web apps to support professors' research projects. Since graduating in 2020, I've worked as a full time software engineer; I've been a SWE at Google in New York City since April 2022.
I have no...
Hi, my name is Conor! I've been writing software for about 15 years. I started in high school and ended up majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics at Haverford College in Philadelphia. In addition to studying CS in college, I worked as a software developer for the college library, writing web apps to support professors' research projects. Since graduating in 2020, I've worked as a full time software engineer; I've been a SWE at Google in New York City since April 2022.
I have no teaching certifications or full-time teaching experience, but I have done tutoring since college. In college, I made money to help pay for school by privately tutoring high schoolers in math (precalculus and calculus). At Google, I have participated in several employee programs related to tutoring and mentoring, including Code2College teaching a 9-week remote programming course to a small class of high schoolers, Code Next offering remote 1-on-1 career mentoring to a high school student over the course of a 7-month program, and most recently V-SWEP, a Google-internal program offering remote 1-on-1 technical interview practice to college students.
My teaching style focuses on building reasoning up from core principles rather than memorization; when teaching programming specifically, this means that I focus on conveying an understanding of exactly what code is having the computer do under the hood, so that you can understand the algorithms you're writing even in a high-level language like Python which hides many of the details from you. I also emphasize good software design and use of abstraction, including using type systems and other tools to your advantage. I strongly recommend that students who want to focus on a dynamically typed language like Python or JavaScript also study at least one lower-level and/or statically typed language.
