Keith Packard
Senior Principal Engineer at AMATEUR RADIO DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKeith Packard is a Senior Principal Engineer with over four decades in system software and more than 26 years focused on modern open-source ecosystems, particularly 2D graphics and the X Window System. He has held senior technical and architect roles at Intel, HPE, SiFive and Amazon, and helped steer projects and governance as a long-time Debian developer and X.Org board member. Keith combines deep low-level expertise—graphics drivers, Mesa/DRI, X11 compositors—and embedded systems work across Zephyr, CircuitPython, QEMU and picolibc, reflecting a rare full-stack view from silicon to user interfaces. He co-founded Altus Metrum to design embedded hardware for rocketry and satellites, bringing practical hardware design into his software practice. An active open-source contributor, his commits include notable improvements to GLSL optimization paths once used by Unity and cross-architecture semihosting in QEMU. Based in Portland, Oregon, he blends historical perspective with hands-on engineering and project stewardship in both hobbyist aerospace and enterprise systems.
26 years of coding experience
37 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics at Reed College
Stackoverflow
11reputation
126reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (99)
drm10
xcb10
float3210
composition10
python10
zephyr-rtos10
server-configuration10
c1110
integrations10
gcc10
c1710
mtls10
gpu10
boot10
arm10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
picolibc/picolibc
Dec 2017 - Jan 2023
picolibc - a C library designed for embedded 32- and 64- bit systems.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 releases, 370 reviews, 2054 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Keith Packard focused on the implementation of C library functions designed for embedded 32- and 64- bit systems. Their contributions involved defining the isblank function, creating and modifying the code for malloc, and fixing issues in the strtod and atan2 functions, addressing alignment and exception handling within this embedded system's C library. They also added tests to validate the proper functioning of the library and to verify its adherence to POSIX standards.
64-bitbitembeddedc-library
mu-editor/mu
Jul 2019 - Feb 2022
A small, simple editor for beginner Python programmers. Written in Python and Qt5.
Role in this project:Software Engineer (Editor/UI Focus)
Software Engineer (Editor/UI Focus)Contributions:1 review, 16 commits, 12 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Keith primarily contributed to improving the user interface and functionality of the Mu editor. Their work focused on enhancing the REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) within the editor, specifically addressing issues related to pasting and theme integration. The user also refactored the codebase to optimize icon loading and scaling, and introduced support for a new "Snek" mode, enhancing the editor's compatibility with embedded systems and Python subset. These contributions demonstrate a focus on improving the overall user experience and extending the editor's capabilities.
pythonpython-beginnerpygameqt5simple-editor
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