Johnathan Van Why is a senior software engineer with 13 years of experience specializing in C++ and Rust for embedded, security-critical, and hard real-time systems. Based in Corvallis, Oregon, he has driven distributed backend development and operational ownership at Google while also contributing as a core member of the Tock embedded OS project, including implementing low-level debugging, modernizing Rust userspace, and authoring Tock's threat model. His work bridges firmware to cloud: designing test infrastructure and hardware drivers for OpenTitan and improving Rust language support for embedded use cases. Comfortable with on-call responsibilities and system-level design tradeoffs, he brings both hands-on low-level coding and system security expertise. An early robotics researcher, he applies practical real-time control and hardware-debugging instincts to robust, auditable software for constrained devices.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Honors Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, Honors Bachelor of Science, Mathematics at Oregon State University
A secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Contributions:476 reviews, 92 commits, 91 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Johnathan implemented a low-level debugging capsule, providing functionality for applications to report errors using inline assembly and interact with a UART. They refactored the console driver, updating its behavior and documentation. Further contributions included porting existing code to the Tock 2.0 syscall API, as well as adjustments to memory management.
Contributions:85 reviews, 298 commits, 259 PRs in 3 years 7 months
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