Michael Brown
Lead Developer at iPXE
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Brown is a seasoned lead developer with 22 years of experience, based in Cambridge, UK, who combines deep low-level systems expertise with product-minded leadership. As lead developer of iPXE and owner of Fen Systems Ltd, he has a long track record of shipping and maintaining critical open-source infrastructure used for network boot and firmware. His contributions span bootloaders, emulators, UEFI firmware, precision time protocols, and distributed file systems—fixing subtle bugs like integer overflows, race conditions, and DNS/URI edge cases in projects such as ipxe, Bochs, edk2, linuxptp and CVMFS. He is particularly strong at the intersection of networking and embedded systems, improving reliability in areas like network drivers, timer interrupts and S3/http integrations. Comfortable both leading projects and doing meticulous core fixes, he brings an engineer’s attention to resource management and protocol correctness that quietly prevents production failures. Trained as an MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cambridge, he pairs formal hardware knowledge with decades of practical software craftsmanship.
22 years of coding experience
Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
56reputation
263reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (46)
timers10
uefi10
c-language10
synchronized10
firmware10
net10
memory-management10
interrupt-handling10
linux10
c1110
networking10
ptp10
c1710
interrupt10
timex10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
ipxe/ipxe
Jun 2008 - Jan 2023
iPXE network bootloader
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:83 reviews, 2889 commits, 251 PRs in 14 years 10 months
Contributions summary:The user, Michael Brown, focused on fixing various bugs within the iPXE network bootloader. Their contributions include addressing integer overflows in memory mappings, ensuring proper handling of errors and resource management in various scenarios (e.g. packet transmissions, command processing, and API calls), and implementing the support for additional features. These changes touched multiple areas of the project, including file management, network device drivers, and the core library functions.
iprouterosospfipv4ipxe
tianocore/edk2
May 2016 - Dec 2022
EDK II
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer
Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:4 commits, 3 PRs, 3 comments in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributes to the UEFI firmware of the EDK II project, specifically by addressing issues related to timer interrupt handlers and network drivers. Their work includes fixing bugs, improving code stability, and enhancing interrupt handling mechanisms. The commits demonstrate a focus on preventing stack overflow, improving interrupt handling efficiency, and resolving potential race conditions. They also made changes to network driver code to conform to specifications.
uefipythonfirmwarec
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