Paul Barker
Ecosystem Engineering And Operations Lead
Leeds, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Barker is an experienced embedded Linux engineer and ecosystem lead with over 15 years in open source, currently guiding Ecosystem Engineering and Operations for the Yocto Project at the Linux Foundation. He has deep hands-on experience upstreaming work to the Linux kernel, U-Boot and Yocto, and has made notable contributions to high-impact projects such as BitBake and libarchive. His background running a solo consultancy and serving as Principal Engineer at SanCloud and Konsulko gives him a rare blend of customer-facing negotiation, product delivery and mentorship skills alongside low-level systems expertise. Paul pairs rigorous debugging and research experience from academia with practical systems administration instincts, which drives his focus on automation, resilient CI/OTA workflows and reproducible builds. He’s presented at major conferences like FOSDEM and ELCE, and his work improving BitBake’s fetcher and hashserv shows an attention to robust tooling that benefits broad embedded communities. Outside of work he’s an amateur wildlife photographer and rambler, reflecting his methodical patience and attention to detail.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Signal Processing Underwater Acoustics, Signal Processing Underwater Acoustics at Loughborough University
English, German, French
Github Skills (56)
git10
archiving10
python10
bitbake10
architecture10
net10
ip10
configuration-management10
linux10
build-system10
c-programming10
c1110
linux-kernel10
networking10
zip10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
openembedded/openembedded-core
Mar 2013 - Sep 2022
The official Git repository is at https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / System Architect
Back-end Developer / System ArchitectContributions:127 commits in 9 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the OpenEmbedded Core project by updating various packages and build system configurations. These updates involved upgrading versions of software packages like opkg and libarchive, integrating new features, and addressing build failures. The changes also included modifications to the build process, such as supporting hierarchical feeds and refining package dependencies. Furthermore, the user demonstrated system architecture skills by refactoring code and addressing compatibility issues, particularly for building with musl.
openembedded
siemens/kas
May 2020 - Aug 2021
Setup tool for bitbake based projects
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:44 commits, 2 comments, 1 issue in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the `kas` project, a setup tool for bitbake based projects, by modifying Python scripts. Their work involved refining build processes, including propagating exit statuses for build and shell commands, and allowing for extra bitbake arguments. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the repository handling and documentation, streamlining the user experience and improving the robustness of the tool.
bitbakeopenembeddedyoctoconfiguration-managementisar
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