CV

CV - Jim MacArthur

jim-web@mode7.co.uk

Summary

• Main skills: C, C++, Python, Assembler (ARM including ARMv8, x86, POWER), compilers and binary translation.
• Other skills: Java, Linux, Windows, AVR
• 18 years experience of wide ranging software development, specializing in code generation and performance tuning.

Employment:

• Februrary 2013 - Present: Senior Software Engineer, Codethink Ltd

  • 2018: Buildstream: BuildStream is an open-source project to provide a tool which orchestrates builds from multiple repositories, controlling version information of all sources, similar to Yocto and Bazel. My contributions can be found via BuildStream.
  • 2017: Camera microcontroller: A 6 month project with one other engineer to produce an 8KB bare-metal Cortex-M0 firmware image to control a computer vision ASIC.
  • 2016: GFortran legacy enhancements: Enhancements to allow GCC to process proprietary Fortran-77 features, to support a legacy codebase. Included RedHat integration work. All work was offered upstream to GCC, which provided both a technical challenge and negotiation to explain the necessity of modifying the compiler instead of patching the legacy codebase.
  • 2013, 2015, 2017: In-car infotainment: Part of several small embedded teams responsible for improving performance of in-car entertainment & information systems, and porting systems to a different processor in a short time frame. For different customers, I made a 10% saving on system memory and successfully ported a system to a new processor in a short time frame due to a supplier problem.
  • 2014: X86 Android emulator: Architect and lead engineer for a desktop-based Android test environment. This was a modification of the X86 Android virtual machine to pass OpenGL through a socket to a native renderer, greatly increasing peformance over the previous emulated OpenGL rendered. I led a team of 3-4 people to deliver this product in 2014 which recevied positive reviews.
  • Contributor to the company blog and Friday talks programme.

• June 2012 - February 2013: Career break

  • Learning Javascript and Python for games development
  • Took and passed the Standford University online Compilers course.

• May 2010 - June 2012: Senior Compiler Engineer, ARM

  • Feasibility study into the use of LLVM as a backend code generator for RVCT.
  • Tuning and benchmarking of memcpy for ARM11 architecture.
  • Bringup of the ARMv8 backends for GCC and GDB.
  • Performance tuning of bzero for big.LITTLE architecture.

• 2004-2010: Senior Software Engineer, Transitive Ltd (Acquired by IBM in June 2009)

  • Developer of dynamic binary translators and related virualization technology for a variety of platform combinations
  • Extensive performance tuning of X86 → POWER translator including making use of the new little-endian features in the POWER6 architecture.
  • X86 → ARM translator performance work on Firefox including automated performance measurement.
  • Lead developer for a new parametized X86 decoder, capable of generating a decoder for high performance or low memory environments. Shipped as part of a product in September 2009.
  • Began work on a microcheckpointing high-availability product for IBM's P-Series line.

• 2003-2004: Developer and system administrator, Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education

• 2001-2003: System administrator, University Of Manchester
• 1996-97, summers 1998 and 1999: Software Technician, Pi Research, Cambridge

Recent conferences attended:

• BazelCon, New York, October 2018
• PyConUK, Cardiff, UK, September 2018
• Gnome Users and Developers conference (GUADEC), UK, July 2017
• FOSDEM, January 2014 & 2017
• Debian Reproducible Builds Summit, Athens, December 2015

Education:

• BSc (Hons), MEng Computer Science 2:1 University of Manchester, 1997-2001

  Specialising in hardware and networking where possible. My projects here included network packet reassembly and distributed multi-user social environments.

Other Interests:

• Electromagnetic Field: Logistics manager for an outdoor technical conference/festival run every two years in the UK. Involves arranging timing and "last-mile" management of deliveries and collections to turn a clean field into a festival and back again.

• Maker spaces: Founding member of Cambridge Makespace. Makespace is a community workshop in Cambridge, for people to meet, learn and build almost anything. Former member of the similar London Hackspace and Manchester Hackspace. Current member of MadFabLab, Manchester UK.

• Embedded Linux and microcontrollers: Experienced hobbyist-level user of AVR/ATmega8 (via bare-metal and Arduino interfaces), PIC and MBED microcontrollers.

• Mechanical Computing:

  Since around 2011 I've been building mechanical computers based on various computing models:

  • A fully mechanical universal Turing machine, based on the 5-symbol 2-state model, exhibited at Maker Faire, Newcastle in March 2011 and further exhibitions in Manchester and Derby.
  • An automaton capable of running rule 110 using a small number of moving parts
  • A working electromechanical demonstration of Langton's Ant
  • 8x8 bit RAM with 3-to-8 address decoder, with a view to building a working replica of the Manchester Small-scale experimental machine (Baby).

Miscellaneous information

• Nationality: British
• Age: 43
• Full UK driving licence

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