Connor Shields

I'm a father based in London — life outside the keyboard is just as full as life inside it. Right now I'm working on getting an allotment up and running: digging, planting, and figuring out what actually grows in London clay. It's slow, physical, deeply satisfying work — about as far from a compiler as you can get.

I'm also in the process of selling off my Pokémon card collection, which has been taking up far too much space for far too long. Every card out the door feels like a small win.

This blog is where I plan to write about all of it. On the technical side: system design, Java performance, and the experience of vibe coding — that particular flow state where the problem and the solution feel like the same thing. On the personal side: allotment plans and progress, recipes I'm cooking, books I'm reading, films I'm watching, and my takes on the Oscars. And then there's the stuff that lives in between — write-ups for each app on this site, gym programming and diet, and whatever else seems worth putting into words.

I've spent 10 years at Fidessa — a global FinTech company providing trading and investment software to financial markets — working primarily on risk management systems that process hundreds of millions of transactions per hour. My work has spanned everything from SPAN margin engine integrations and multi-tenant architecture to global infrastructure rollouts across APAC, EMEA, and the Americas.

I'm now deliberately expanding into modern web development, and this website is that project in public. The apps here — Nutrient Tracker, Gym Tracker, Oscar Tracker, and the AI Trading Agent dashboard — are built with Next.js, TypeScript, and a modern serverless stack. They let me apply the same engineering habits I've built over nearly a decade to a completely different set of tools.