Ken Bannister
Backend Engineer at balena
Greater Boston United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKen Bannister is a backend engineer with 13 years of professional experience designing and shipping embedded and server-side systems, currently contributing to balena’s embedded Linux platform. He combines deep Java expertise with low-level C and networking know-how, and is the primary author and long-time maintainer of gcoap, a widely used CoAP library for RIOT OS. His work spans firmware for OpenWSN, protocol fixes and unit tests in RIOT, and cloud-integrated data pipelines—reflecting a rare full-stack fluency from constrained IoT motes to AWS-hosted services. A trained computer scientist and researcher with a background in wireless embedded networks, he favors pragmatic, incremental design and open-source collaboration. Based in Greater Boston, he also brings hands-on tooling and monitoring experience from leading wireless networking efforts and driving migrations like Git adoption at previous employers.
13 years of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Cal State - East Bay, San Francisco StateMaster of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Arizona State UniversityBachelor of Science - BS, Botany, Bachelor of Science - BS, Botany at North Carolina State University
Github Skills (18)
algorithm10
coap10
firmware10
internet-of-things10
c1110
ws10
c1710
iot10
rtos10
sys10
checker10
embedded10
checksum10
networking9
internet9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
RIOT-OS/RIOT
Nov 2015 - Mar 2022
RIOT - The friendly OS for IoT
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Back-end Developer & Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:1 release, 237 commits, 145 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ken contributed to the RIOT operating system by implementing and improving the internet checksum functionality. The contributions included adding a new function `inet_csum_slice()` to fix checksum calculations for layer 4 payloads and updating existing files to utilize the new checksum function. In addition, the user added unit tests to verify the functionality of `inet_csum_slice()`. Furthermore, the user made multiple contributions related to the CoAP protocol.
riot-osinternetofthingsrtosriotmicrocontrollers
openwsn-berkeley/openwsn-fw
Jun 2013 - May 2016
OpenWSN firmware: stuff that runs on a mote
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 2 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributed to the firmware of the OpenWSN project. Their work focused on fixing bugs, improving CoAP request/response matching, and optimizing existing code. They implemented changes related to the TelosB LED functionality and HDLC command handling, demonstrating knowledge of hardware-specific configurations. Additionally, the user made minor adjustments to the build process, focusing on simulation library support.
firmwaremoteruns
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