About Adam

Adam DeConinck (he/him) works as a computer systems engineer on high-performance computing systems designed for researchers and engineers to solve scientific problems. He is currently the HPC Manager at IonQ, where he supports "classical" HPC platforms used by IonQ's research teams to design new quantum computing systems and applications.

Adam's professional background is as a system administrator / production engineer / site reliability engineer, depending on the titles in vogue at the time. Often this has included not just operational work, but also the underlying system design for reliability and performance. His experience includes participating in the design and build of some of the largest and highest-performing compute and storage systems in the world, including being on-call for fixing them when they were broken!

Adam enjoys working on problems that require a deep understanding of both hardware and software, from the datacenter design all the way through the application. He has strong opinions about distributed systems design for actually running in production, building effective teams that can both design and operate interesting computing systems, and how to learn from both the successes and failures of your systems.

Outside of computing, Adam's interests include the history of science and engineering; playing tabletop RPGs; curling (the sport with the rocks on ice! 🥌); fencing (the sport with swords!); and baking tasty desserts. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado, USA, with his partner, three cats, and a dog that looks like a muppet.

You can find Adam on the Internet on the Fediverse, Bluesky, and his intermittently-updated blog, Thinking Out Loud. Email is still probably the best way to reach Adam that will get a reply, and you can reach him at ajdecon@ajdecon.org.