Ferdia Mckeogh
PHD Researcher at University of St Andrews
St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFerdia Mckeogh is a systems engineer and PhD researcher in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews with a decade of hands-on experience building secure, high-performance systems in Rust, embedded C, and parallel computing. He has commercial pedigree from an Apple internship and consulting work, plus deep embedded/IoT experience contributing firmware to well-known projects like Betaflight/Cleanflight and a Rust HAL for nRF chips. His work spans cryptographic tooling and secure device provisioning—designing key management and firmware delivery pipelines—and low-level performance engineering, including SIMD, multithreading and GPU acceleration of legacy Fortran code. An active open-source contributor, he implemented key OpenPGP features in a pure-Rust rpgp library and consistently focuses on robust, well-documented solutions. Notably, he blends academic research with production consulting, making him adept at translating novel ideas into deployable, security-conscious software.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at University of St Andrews
Stackoverflow
431reputation
16kreached
0answers
4questions
Github Skills (42)
openpgp10
game-controller10
controller10
gps10
beta-release10
beta-testing10
c-programming10
c1110
c1710
f10
fan-controller10
sys10
cryptography10
embedded10
beta-versions10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
nrf-rs/nrf-hal
Feb 2019 - Jul 2020
A Rust HAL for the nRF family of devices
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 11 PRs, 46 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Ferdia primarily contributed to the implementation of a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for the nRF family of devices, specifically focusing on the nRF52810. Their work involved adding support for the nRF52810, configuring SPIM, ADC, and I2C interfaces, and integrating the random number generator. Key changes included defining pin mappings and configuring the underlying hardware peripherals in the nrf-hal crate.
nrf52nrf52840rustbluetoothmicrocontroller
betaflight/betaflight
Feb 2016 - Mar 2025
Open Source Flight Controller Firmware
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:3 PRs, 17 comments in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ferdia contributed to the firmware of a flight controller by updating GPS and serial communication functionalities. These updates included enabling GPS passthrough and modifying serial port handling. The user's work involved changes to the `gps.c`, `serial.c`, `serial.h`, and `serial_cli.c` files, demonstrating an understanding of serial communication protocols and flight controller firmware design. The user also created a new `serialConsumer` type, a useful tool for filtering or modifying serial data.
flightcontrollerbetaflightfirmwareflight-controller
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