Derek Fountain
Director at Core Minutes Ltd
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Fountain is a seasoned embedded software engineer and director with over 30 years of experience designing and delivering mission-critical systems for blue-chip clients. He specializes in low-level C development for resource-constrained embedded environments, with practical assembly experience on MIPS, ARM and Z80 and a long-standing daily use of Linux since 1994. Derek combines deep hardware familiarity—reading schematics, using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers—with modern software practices including Git, Gerrit and JIRA, and has implemented performance-sensitive features like streaming LZW and on-the-fly AES encryption in enterprise storage products. He also brings strong security expertise from network security analysis and penetration testing, plus a track record building cross-platform systems from RTOS firmware to J2EE and web front ends. An active retro-computing enthusiast, he applies lessons from restoring Sinclair and Z80 platforms to contemporary embedded design and tooling. Based in London with dual British–Australian citizenship, he runs a tech services company and thrives in problem-solving, high-pressure engineering roles.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. (Hons), Computer Science, B.Sc. (Hons), Computer Science at London South Bank University
Github Skills (52)
libc10
z8010
development-kit10
libm10
c-compiler10
sdcc10
sega-genesis10
zx-spectrum10
linker10
assembler10
6800010
embedded10
8-bit10
apple210
retrocomputing10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
derekfountain/z88dk-zxspectrum-examples
May 2018 - Jan 2023
Contributions:32 commits, 30 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 8 months
derekfountain/zx-spectrum-pico-interface-one
Feb 2023 - Apr 2024
A recreation of the ZX Spectrum Expansion System, a hardware Microdrive emulator
Contributions:4 releases, 2 PRs, 74 pushes in 1 year 2 months
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