Chris Rankin
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Rankin is a seasoned software developer with a career stretching back to 1996, specialising in Kotlin/Java ecosystems and backend systems across telecommunications, financial services and music streaming. He spent six years at R3 contributing to Corda—adding critical features like getCashBalances() and enhanced RPC permissioning—and has earlier worked on low-level JVM work in the Avian project, implementing bytecode invocation semantics and threading exception handling. Based in London, he combines deep academic training in mathematics (Cambridge) and a PhD-level analytical mindset with practical engineering experience delivering core platform features. Colleagues would point to his knack for improving core system correctness and access control, and his preference for tackling subtle runtime and protocol-level problems.
9 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Certificate of Advanced Study, Mathematics (Part III), Certificate of Advanced Study, Mathematics (Part III) at Queens College, CambridgeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at The University of Sheffield
English
Github Skills (22)
kotlin10
jvm10
bytecode-manipulation10
java10
openjdk10
javas10
rpc10
compile10
compiler10
jit10
distributed-ledger-technology9
security9
multithreading9
blockchain9
exception-handling9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
corda/corda
Feb 2017 - Nov 2022
Corda is an open source blockchain project, designed for business from the start. Only Corda allows you to build interoperable blockchain networks that transact in strict privacy. Corda's smart contract technology allows businesses to transact directly, with value.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 70 reviews, 542 commits in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Chris's commits primarily focused on implementing and enhancing features within the Corda platform. They added the `getCashBalances()` method, a crucial functionality for retrieving cash balances in the system. The contributions included modifications across multiple core components, like the client, node, and core modules, signifying a focus on building core features and improving the system. Moreover, their work involved implementing the "ALL" permission feature for RPC users, enhancing security and access control within the node.
interoperabledltsmart-contractprivacytransact
ReadyTalk/avian
Jul 2017 - Sep 2017
[INACTIVE] Avian is a lightweight virtual machine and class library designed to provide a useful subset of Java's features, suitable for building self-contained applications.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 7 PRs, 11 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the `avian` project, a lightweight JVM, by implementing and refining core JVM functionality. Their work includes adding support for `invokevirtual`, `invokeinterface` and related bytecode instructions, which are essential for method invocation in Java. They fixed issues related to resolving system classes and handling uncaught exceptions within threads. The user also refactored and updated existing code related to the constant pool, and implemented features to support the `Thread.uncaughtExceptionHandler`.
inactiveself-containedclass-libraryvirtual-machinejvm
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