I'm Adam Owada. I build tools to empower people.

I've loved making (and breaking) things since I was a kid. It started with legos, and creating my own mechs by combining Bionicle lego sets together into ever more complex iterations and of course having them fight each other. I took apart broken electronics, played around with BASIC, and told my parents I wanted to be an inventor. I liked reading about codes and ciphers, and I wrote a report in high school based largely on Simon Singh's "The Code Book" where I learned about the math behind public-key cryptography. The idea that one-way functions operated like "locks" blew my mind. 🤯

I was interested in everything but lacked a clear vision. I loved the intellectual challenge of the legal profession and tried law school. It wasn't until IBM's Watson years later that my creative mind really saw the possibility of programming and the potential of AI. I bought a GTX 1070 graphics card, watched a few tutorials, and even got an MNIST digit recognizer model working. I thought this code thing was pretty cool! I quickly realized that I lacked the basics and foundation to really understand what I was doing, and the whole self-taught route just wasn't working for me.

Having a goal is great, and mine was learning how to code. Properly this time. My buddy told me about a coding bootcamp called Code Fellows, and I learned web development in JavaScript and Python in 2020. I built a stock prediction model using Keras and Tensorflow for my final project. I love code because I can build tools and apps to be more productive in less time; "tools that can build other tools".

Since learning to code, I've built tech companies, taught coding classes, and developed a wide range of applications, APIs, and web scrapers—covering the full spectrum of software development. Currently, I'm the co-founder and sole developer of Observe Safety, an app and company I'm creating with my dad to help construction companies efficiently record and manage their safety data. We've recently begun the alpha testing phase.