Alex James
Member Of Technical Staff 3 - Virtual Machine Monitor Group at VMware
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex James is a systems-focused software engineer with 11 years of experience, currently a Member of Technical Staff 3 on VMware’s Virtual Machine Monitor team in the Greater Chicago area. He brings deep low-level expertise in firmware, bootloaders, and virtualization—evidenced by substantive contributions to prominent open-source projects like coreboot and OpenCore—and has implemented hardware enablement, ACPI/CBFS fixes, and performance-focused changes such as AES-NI acceleration. His background spans embedded systems, firmware reverse-engineering (Ghidra plugins for UEFI), and system architecture, complemented by practical cloud and frontend exposure from internships at Amazon and swarm robotics work. Notably, he combines board-level hardware configuration skills with modern C++ and build-system refactors, making him effective at bridging firmware, hypervisor, and tooling gaps.
11 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago
Github Skills (33)
bootloader10
c-language10
assembly10
firmware10
bios10
cmake10
opencore10
c1110
c1710
gdb10
psr-310
u-boot10
sys10
cryptography10
assembler10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
RPCS3/rpcs3
Jun 2018 - Jan 2021
PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:3 reviews, 13 commits, 11 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex contributed to the PlayStation 3 emulator, focusing on system-level functionality and performance improvements. They addressed a camera-related bug by fixing a function call. The user refactored the CMake build system, defining versioning variables and generating a header file for version information. Furthermore, they implemented AES-NI acceleration for improved cryptographic performance and reworked GDB functions to use more modern C++ features. Finally, they added functionality to control display sleep.
playstationassembly-languagecppemulatorvulkan
acidanthera/OpenCorePkg
Jun 2020 - Dec 2021
OpenCore bootloader
Role in this project:System Architect / Software Architect
System Architect / Software ArchitectContributions:5 commits, 6 PRs, 2 branches in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex made several contributions focused on enhancing the OpenCore bootloader. They addressed compilation issues in ACPI samples by fixing code related to SSDT-SBUS-MCHC.dsl, and added a new option, `SystemMemoryStatus`, to the `Generic` section in `OpenCorePlatform.c`. The user also implemented modifications in `OcMemoryLib` to avoid division by zero errors. Furthermore, the user introduced a FUZZ option in the Makefile used for Utilities.
bootloaderopencore
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