Howard Chu
CTO And Founder, V.P. R&D at Symas Corp.
Ireland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHoward Chu is a veteran software engineer and technology leader with 40 years of experience, currently serving as CTO and Founder / VP R&D at Symas in Ireland where he drives enterprise-scale identity and directory solutions. Renowned for building ultra-high-performance systems—from the world’s fastest multiprocessor TCP and Appletalk stacks to LDAP servers and real-time DSP pipelines—he combines obsessive correctness with ruthless optimization. He has been a key architect of the OpenLDAP project and a long-time contributor to core system tooling and security software (GCC, OpenSSL, Cyrus SASL, Heimdal Kerberos, etc.). His open‑source contributions span critical infrastructure and databases, including fixes and performance work in RandomX, Monero, and libmdbx (now used by modern Ethereum frontiers). He excels at squeezing efficiency from existing codebases—network stacks, device drivers, kernels, encryption, and embedded databases—while avoiding tradeoffs that sacrifice correctness for speed.
40 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BSECE Computer Engineering, BSECE Computer Engineering at University of Michigan
Stackoverflow
1,425reputation
166kreached
47answers
1question
Github Skills (40)
debugging10
ldap10
debug10
transaction10
storage-engine10
c-language10
key-value10
lmdb10
memory-management10
databases10
authentication10
c1110
sasl10
security10
c1710
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
monero-project/monero
Dec 2015 - Jul 2022
Monero: the secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:107 reviews, 306 commits, 212 PRs in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Howard primarily worked on improving the Monero blockchain database, focusing on efficiency and security. The contributions involved fixing data references in read-only transactions to prevent data corruption, and optimizing code for the use of LMDB which is the blockchain database implementation. The user's work also included integrating features that allow users to access and manipulate data that is stored in the blockchain database efficiently. The user fixed multiple related bugs in addition to the initial changes.
securecryptographycmakeuntraceableprivacy
tevador/RandomX
Sep 2019 - Jul 2022
Proof of work algorithm based on random code execution
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 17 commits, 23 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Howard primarily contributed to improving the RandomX proof-of-work algorithm. Their work included fixing build issues for Windows (Win32) using GCC by modifying the handling of x87 instructions. They addressed performance by optimizing the W^X policy for Apple silicon Macs and fixed absolute address references to prevent dynamic linker problems. Additional contributions involved caching input data and handling memory allocation at a low-level.
random-codeexecutioncode-executionproof-of-work
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