about
John Connolly. Software engineer based on Long Island.
Currently Lead Product Engineer at Data Society, building LLM platforms (RAG on AWS Bedrock + Claude, MCP servers, agentic tooling). Previously Principal Engineer at Flow Commerce, where I helped build the international checkout that became Shopify Managed Markets. Full resume.
This blog is mostly notes I take while working on something I want to remember the shape of later, occasionally polished into something readable. Currently posting after a hiatus that lasted longer than I’d care to admit.
You can find me on GitHub and LinkedIn. For everything else, the username is usually ollyconn. I read email at john at this domain.
I went through Hacker School (now the Recurse Center) in batch [2], winter 2012.
If you’re working on something at the intersection of LLM platforms, MCP, or local-first AI infra and want to compare notes, the email address above is the best path.
writing
Ancient academic work, linking it here for the first time.
Grim, P., Selinger, E., Braynen, W., Rosenberger, R., Au, R., Louie, N., & Connolly, J. (2004). Reducing Prejudice: A Spatialized Game-Theoretic Model for the Contact Hypothesis. In Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, pp. 244–250. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-66183-7.
· MIT Press chapter · Open-access PDF · Original figures + animations · Interactive port on this site · NetLogo reimplementation by Braynen
A spatialized agent-based game-theoretic model of Allport’s contact hypothesis — the only major theory of prejudice reduction in social psychology — tested across a large array of agents. Results support the hypothesis and suggest a deeper mechanism than the appeals to conceptual re-organization that dominated the prior literature. Done at SUNY Stony Brook’s Group for Logic and Formal Semantics under Dr. Patrick Grim.
Grim, P., Selinger, E., Braynen, W., Rosenberger, R., Au, R., Louie, N., & Connolly, J. (2005). Modeling Prejudice Reduction: Spatialized Game Theory and the Contact Hypothesis. Public Affairs Quarterly, 19(2), 95–126.
· JSTOR · University of Maryland DRUM mirror
Extended journal version of the ALife IX paper — same model, longer treatment of the philosophical and social-policy implications.
old posts elsewhere
A handful of posts from a previous internet life, surfaced via the Wayback Machine. Links go to archive.org snapshots since the original hosts are gone or unrecognizable.
Bug Labs community blog (2008–2011)
Hardware and Linux notes from my time at Bug Labs — OSGi, the BUG modular hardware platform, OMAP kernels, audio servers, and the gear-tweaking that came with it. The original community.buglabs.net is gone.
MoMA Talk to Me (2011) — wrote Processing color-tracking code targeting the BUG hardware platform at Bug Labs, in collaboration with Jer Thorp. The BUG was exhibited in Talk to Me (Jul–Nov 2011); my Processing & BUG post on the Bug Labs community blog (tagged processing BUG java dataviz moma) is the technical writeup. Archived code: ColorClusters.
146377_BugLabs.m4v.- MotherBUG: Bigger, Badder, Unplugged
- MotherBUG + Von Hippel + Arduino Mini + Servo Motor — Dec 2008
- building JNI bundles — Jan 2009
- Features features features — Feb 2009
- Bug Labs Codeswarm: 3+ years of code — Sep 2009
- Fun with Java, our repo, java-gnome, and dbus-java — Sep 2009
- Total Request Live! — Dec 2009
- Compile your own kernel — Feb 2010
- Using MPD, your BUGbase and BUGsound to make an audio server — Mar 2010
- building a BUG App against the API in svn trunk — Apr 2010
- How to make upgrading your BUG much easier — Jul 2010
- Marvell 88W8686, OLPC, libertas_tf… BUG as wifi AP? — Jul 2010
- I just gave $36 to last.fm — Jul 2010
- Qualcomm vs. Sierra — Jul 2010
- Friday afternoon remote debugging, remotely — Sep 2010
- my love of apt — Sep 2010
- What’s up with 2? — Oct 2010
- Having OpenJDK 6 sources display in Eclipse — Oct 2010
- Pardon our appearance — Nov 2010
- R2.1 available for download — Feb 2011
- suggested free reading — Feb 2011
- BUG Software R2.0.2 available for consumption — Mar 2011
- Processing & BUG — Jun 2011
- BUG Software R2.1.0 (based on linaro 2.6.35) now available — Jun 2011
TheLadders engineering blog (2013)
- Denormalize the Datas for Great Good — July 2013. Why denormalization paid off for a particular search/serve path at TheLadders.
foo(bar){mustache} (2012–2014, personal Tumblr)
Short posts, starting during Hacker School batch [2] and trailing off through 2014:
- My Hacker School batch[2] experience so far — April 2012
- Read It Later is now Pocket?
- Java <-> node.js RPC
- Didn’t Read LOL
- Ruby: 1, Java: 0
- TIL: Java Pattern (regex) objects are not .equals() friendly
- j2labs / fibonacci pigeons
- May 2012 “Who’s Hiring” on Hacker News
- Rails lolwat — July 2012
- “No really, this blog I’ll maintain.” — August 2012
- Maintenance of my application — September 2012
- Couchbase tuning — April 2013
- You should feel like a dilettante — July 2014
cringecore (2001–2004, SUNY Stony Brook student page)
Earlier than the rest. The student site at sinc.sunysb.edu/Stu/jeconnol/ where some of the images on this page were saved from. Undergrad voice, all of it — bring sunglasses.
Journal entries:
- etcetera (Mar 2004) — an apology for neglecting the site, dialogued with an imaginary reader. The earliest documented instance of me promising to maintain this blog more often.
- etcetera5 (Dec 2001 – Jan 2002) — unplugging a tower one cable at a time, watching the last of the radiation leave the screen.
- etcetera6 (Sep – Oct 2001) — a tic-tac-toe quasi-fractal, an Anaïs Nin quote, and feeling like the rower in the center of Monet’s Soleil Levant.
Java applets (won’t run anymore — Java applets stopped working in browsers a decade ago):
- programs.html — index of four applets: a polygon drawer, a calculator, a tic-tac-toe quasi-fractal, and Koch’s snowflake fractal.
- points.html — “John and Jimmy’s Applet”.
Misc:
- Sartre, Nausea, pp. 94–96 — a passage I typed up for the web in 2002 because I wanted other people to read it.
