Joel Holdsworth
Principal Firmware Engineer at Holdsworth Integrated Solutions Ltd.
Campbell, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Holdsworth is a Principal Firmware Engineer with 19 years of experience building embedded systems and firmware, currently driving low-level software at NVIDIA while running his own engineering consultancy. He combines deep C/C++/Python skills, Linux and open-source expertise with electronics and mechanical design training from an MEng at Imperial College. Joel is a pragmatic problem-solver who has improved toolchain compatibility in the Zephyr RTOS, enhanced media streaming and proxy support in the widely used Kodi project, and contributed practical fixes across Git, Wine and FPGA tooling. Comfortable across hardware and software boundaries, he often tackles portability and performance edge cases—modernizing legacy code and improving cross-platform robustness. Based in Campbell, California, he blends principal-level architecture work with hands-on contributions that keep complex embedded products shipping.
19 years of coding experience
Master of Engineering (MEng) Mechanical Engineering, Master of Engineering (MEng) Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London
English
Stackoverflow
363reputation
41kreached
0answers
6questions
Github Skills (65)
verilog10
python10
wp-api10
proxy10
winapi10
c1110
gcc10
subprocess10
c1710
media-player10
cplus10
file-processing10
embedded10
cpp10
ws-api10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
YosysHQ/icestorm
Oct 2015 - May 2018
Project IceStorm - Lattice iCE40 FPGAs Bitstream Documentation (Reverse Engineered)
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to the `iceprog` tool, which appears to be used for programming Lattice iCE40 FPGAs. Their commits focused on improving the usability and functionality of the tool, including adding support for reading and writing data to pipes, printing status messages to stderr, and enhancing the help message. Further contributions include allowing truth tables to be specified as an init string and accepting device types like HX1K in `icebox_hlc2asc.py`.
bitstreamiceicestorm
zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr
Jan 2025 - Mar 2026
Primary Git Repository for the Zephyr Project. Zephyr is a new generation, scalable, optimized, secure RTOS for multiple hardware architectures.
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 12 PRs, 45 comments in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on fixing compiler and toolchain compatibility issues within the Zephyr RTOS project. They addressed problems related to GCC versioning, including handling different header file locations and supporting older compilers. Their contributions also involved modifying kernel macros and exception handling routines to ensure correct initialization and operation across various architectures, demonstrating a strong understanding of embedded systems development.
hardwarertosiotembeddedreal-time
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.