Quentin Barnes
Free-lance Senior Staff Software Engineer Architect at Self Employed / Semi-retired
Champaign, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolQuentin Barnes is a freelance Senior Staff Software Engineer and Architect with 26 years of experience designing and hardening low-level systems, kernels, and toolchains for companies including Yahoo/Verizon and Motorola. He combines deep expertise in Linux/BSD/UNIX kernels, C/C++, ARM and x86 assembly, and performance analysis with a proven track record of saving tens to hundreds of millions through novel designs and bug fixes. Notable achievements include defending a kernel routing-cache patent, eliminating a defect costing $100K/hour, reducing Yahoo!’s load-balancer costs by $20M/year, and inventing kernel-probing and virtual critical-section techniques that solved multi-processor and real-time issues. Based in Champaign, IL, he mentors engineers, contributes to open source, and brings an unusual blend of firmware-level intuition and practical cost-conscious architecture—plus a personal interest in retrocomputing that feeds his hardware-minded problem solving.
26 years of coding experience
33 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (65)
floppy10
perl10
boundaries10
aircrack-ng10
android-ndk10
xposed10
ksh9
injection9
defold9
server9
ports9
load-balancing9
libimobiledevice9
kebab-case8
frame8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
qbarnes/catweasel-cw
Dec 2019 - Oct 2020
Contributions:15 commits, 11 pushes, 3 branches in 9 months
qbarnes/gw2dmk
Jul 2024 - Mar 2025
Contributions:188 pushes, 15 branches, 2 tags in 7 months
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