After growing up on a farm in Iowa, McDonnell attended Carthage College in Kenosha Wisconsin.  There, he was a webmaster and created the first visual room signup in Macromedia Flash.   After graduation, McDonnell worked for 8 years at Walgreens Corp where he held many roles including Developer, Performance Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Store Engineer.  There, he worked on a team to build out an updated system to automate and manage all 8000 stores and the tech in them. 

 

McDonnell then went on to work at VMware, where he spent time as a Solutiuons Engineer and a Technical Architect.  In 2020, he moved to MuleSoft in the role of an Infrastructure, Security, and Networking specialist before joining the team at Alucid Solutions.

 

Outside of his work at Alucid, McDonnell is married to a therapist who calls him her “life project.”   They live in Chicago with their two cats and a dog.  He fills his free time with dog training, lifting, swimming and drinking way too much coffee.

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Some fun facts about McDonnell: 

While he spends most of his time hanging out in his office, he actually has his own bar in his basement!

 

His ideal travel plans would be to New Zealand, where he would walk from the Shire to Mordor.