Paul Howarth
Senior Logic Design Engineer at MDA Space
Trafford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Howarth is a Senior Logic Design Engineer with 20 years' experience designing SoCs and FPGAs using VHDL and maintaining Red Hat–based Linux build and packaging systems. He has held senior roles across space and storage firms (MDA Space, Satixfy, Micron) and brings practical expertise in toolchain, build-system and packaging maintenance. An active Fedora package maintainer since 2005, he pairs hardware design chops with deep open-source security and compatibility work—contributions to high-profile projects like curl, ProFTPD, Dovecot and Paramiko show a focus on fixing vulnerabilities, build portability and cryptography compatibility. Based in Trafford, UK, he blends disciplined, long-term engineering with a knack for solving obscure build and interoperability issues that surface across hardware, firmware and network software stacks.
20 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at The University of Manchester
Github Skills (33)
unit-testing10
debug10
python10
testing10
configuration-management10
c-programming10
ftp10
c1110
libcurl10
security10
c1710
nss10
openssl10
unit-test10
imap9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
proftpd/proftpd
Apr 2017 - Jun 2021
ProFTPD source code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:24 commits, 19 PRs, 96 comments in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements related to the ProFTPD server's codebase. Their work involved addressing issues in file system operations, TLS cipher suite configurations, and the handling of system profiles. They also implemented new features like the "--enable-tests=local-only" option and fixed test failures caused by Y2038 and other system-specific issues. The user's contributions included modifying API tests and incorporating a change to use /etc/hosts file rather than /etc/resolv.conf in unit tests.
unixposixftpssftp-serversftp
curl/curl
Apr 2010 - Dec 2022
A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:15 commits, 6 PRs, 17 comments in 12 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on improving the security and compatibility of the cURL library, addressing vulnerabilities and compatibility issues. They fixed build problems related to OpenSSL and NSS versions, ensuring the library functioned correctly with older and newer versions of security libraries. Furthermore, the user addressed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and deprecated SHA-1 usage in certificates to enhance the library's security posture.
rtmppop3dictscptelnet
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.