Connor Hillen

So who am I?

I'm a developer in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. After an undergrad in computer science, I moved on to my master's where I'm researching computational creativity. I was originally from a small town in Southern Ontario called Strathroy. There, and at an even smaller school in an even smaller town just a few years before that, is where I got to teach my first students web applications.

Mind you, I was in Grade 7, my students were staff from the across the school board, and this was right around the birth of Web 2.0. Up until that point it was websites in Neopets, choose your own adventure games in QBasic, and a few personal sites. The love for learning, teaching, and creation, led me start the programming club in highschool and teach C++ for competition programming. There were also a number of adventure games, arcade games, poems, and hacking sims written along the way! High school was a great time to learn some basic graphic design, video editing, and America's Army team tactics.

The bug wasn't fixed with highschool. Starting an undergrad at Carleton, I was elected into the Carleton Computer Science Society and spent four years running events, giving talks, interviewing for unviersity recruitment, and working as a teaching assistant. I started my research career in first year working on multitouch web applications and user experience. I started teaching occasional lectures in my third year, and was hired on as a contract instructor in the first year of my master's tasked with designing a new, hands on course on agile game development. I've done a little bit of consulting for startups, as well as spending a summer as lead developer with a small team.

Now I spend my days going to game development events, working on my thesis, designing games, and trying to keep up to date with interesting tech.

What work have I done?

For more structured info, feel free to check out my resume.

What sorts of side projects?

For lists, links, and images, check out my projects page.