James Woodcock
Senior Embedded Engineer at SWARCO
Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Woodcock is a Senior Embedded Engineer with 16 years of experience building reliable firmware and scalable cloud-adjacent solutions, currently based in Milton Keynes. He spent over two decades at Aculab honing telecom and embedded systems expertise and recently moved to SWARCO to lead senior engineering efforts. A pragmatic developer with strong backend instincts, he contributes to mature open-source projects like FontForge and MDBTools—fixing obscure compilation and SQL parsing bugs and improving data export fidelity. James pairs low-level C/firmware problem-solving with an appreciation for tooling and documentation, often surfacing build-process insights that help long-lived projects remain maintainable.
16 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe
Github Skills (12)
c1710
databases10
font-editor10
c1110
sql10
database10
mysql9
parsing9
parse9
parser9
acc7
odbc7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
mdbtools/mdbtools
Sep 2020 - Feb 2021
MDB Tools - Read Access databases on *nix
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 15 commits, 9 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the `mdb-sql` tool, specifically improving its SQL parsing and execution capabilities. Their contributions involved adding support for SQL terminators (`;`) and handling SQL input from files using the `:r` command, and implementing support for the `SELECT TOP n [PERCENT]` queries. Furthermore, the user also made modifications to the `mdb-export` tool, refining date formats and correctly handling binary blobs for various database backends, including MySQL. They also implemented a MySQL serial type for schema exports.
odbc-driverdatabasesdatabaseaccdbms-access
fontforge/fontforge
Nov 2015 - Nov 2015
Free (libre) font editor for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU+Linux
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 1 PR, 3 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `acorn2sfd` component of the fontforge project, which converts outline fonts used with RISC OS. They focused on bug fixes, addressing issues related to compilation and incorrect glyph indexes. Furthermore, the user added comments and documentation, offering insights into the build process and the purpose of the `acorn2sfd` utility.
font-editormac-oswindowslibrelinux
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