Ian Mcinerney
FPGA Engineer at Imperial College London
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Mcinerney is an FPGA engineer and research software engineer with 13 years of experience building high-reliability embedded systems and scientific software, currently developing core FPGA firmware for the magnetometer on NASA's HelioSwarm mission while supporting dynamics research at Imperial College London. He combines deep hardware and low-level software expertise—FPGA design for space instruments and mixed-precision linear algebra research—with a track record of improving portability and correctness across widely used open-source projects like Julia, wxWidgets, Audacity, and the KiCad mirror. His contributions span C++ refactors, build-system and CI improvements, and thread-safety modernizations, reflecting a pragmatic focus on maintainability and cross-platform robustness. Ian’s background includes applied aerospace internships (Johns Hopkins APL, MIT Lincoln Laboratory) and industrial sensing work that led to a patent application, showing an ability to move innovations from prototype to deployed hardware. He holds advanced degrees in electrical engineering and is pursuing a PhD in High Performance Embedded and Distributed Systems, blending academic rigor with production engineering. Notably, he works on both spaceflight-grade FPGA firmware and core language/runtime fixes, a rare mix that ties algorithmic correctness to mission-critical implementation.
13 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, Master of Science, Electrical Engineering at Iowa State UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, High Performance Embedded and Distributed Systems (HiPEDS), Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, High Performance Embedded and Distributed Systems (HiPEDS) at Imperial College LondonHigh School, High School at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Github Skills (35)
code-optimization10
c-language10
continuous-integration10
multiplatform10
multithreading10
thread-safety10
llvm10
cin10
cmake10
cross-platform10
c1110
wxwidgets10
c1710
audio10
gtk10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
osqp/osqp
Aug 2019 - Jan 2023
The Operator Splitting QP Solver
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 75 reviews, 360 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to improving the codebase's build process and ensuring its compatibility with various environments. Their work included making error macros C99 friendly, fixing build errors related to profiling, and adding support for embedded builds within the Travis CI system. Furthermore, they modified the build process to ensure correct test execution and addressed memory management issues to prevent segfaults. These changes collectively enhanced the build process, portability, and stability of the OSQP project.
optimization-methodsportfolio-optimizationmodel-predictive-controloperatornumerical-optimization
KiCad/kicad-source-mirror
May 2019 - Jan 2023
This is an active mirror of the KiCad development branch, which is hosted at GitLab (updated every time something is pushed). Pull requests on GitHub are not accepted or watched.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:765 commits in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ian's contributions primarily focused on refactoring the code related to mutexes within the KiCad source mirror. They replaced existing Boost mutexes with `std::mutex` for thread safety and removed unnecessary header files, as indicated by the commit messages. The user appears to be involved in code modernization and optimization efforts within the codebase.
3d-modelshostedgitlabupdatedkicad
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