Ford Peprah
Embedded Software Engineer at Block
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFord Peprah is an embedded software engineer with 13 years of experience designing and shipping firmware and tools for payment terminals, wearables, and embedded platforms. Currently at Block after several impactful roles at Square, he has deep experience in OS architecture, build systems, and embedded development tooling across products like Square Terminal and Register. His open-source contributions include enhancing pylink with RTT support and Python 3 compatibility—work that reflects a hands-on approach to debugging and device programming workflows. A Waterloo computer science graduate based in Toronto, he blends low-level hardware understanding with practical system integration and developer tooling. Notably, his background spans both consumer devices (Pebble) and high-scale fintech hardware, showing an unusual mix of product-driven firmware and infrastructure-focused engineering.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computer Science (B.CS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Computer Science (B.CS), Computer Science at University of Waterloo
English, French
Stackoverflow
2,579reputation
228kreached
68answers
12questions
authentication
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
validation
top-5%
Github Skills (24)
debugging10
python10
firmware10
sys10
embedded10
testing9
javascript9
authentication9
unit-testing9
functional-testing9
validation9
cookie9
swd9
nodejs9
unit-test9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
square/pylink
Sep 2017 - Dec 2022
Python Library for device debugging/programming via J-Link
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:47 releases, 62 reviews, 61 commits in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ford primarily contributed to the `pylink` library, focusing on enhancing its functionality and supporting new features. Key contributions include adding RTT (Real-Time Transfer) support, including control buffer and status information. They also addressed Python 3 compatibility issues and updated the library's version, reflecting bug fixes and feature implementations such as SWD read fixes. The user also worked on the build process, incorporating changes like fixing Pandoc installation and adding a missing dependency for the library's setup.
debuggingjlinkpythonarmfirmware
hkpeprah/marmoset
May 2013 - Mar 2017
Command line interface and Python package for UW's Marmoset submission server
Contributions:3 releases, 47 commits, 4 PRs in 3 years 11 months
command-line-interfacepython
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