Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale, his interests, and how to contact him.
I'm a computer scientist and professional programmer based in Sydney, Australia. I'm open for
commercial work.
Research
I'm interested in low-level work and operating systems. I completed my doctoral thesis,
Architecture Optimisation, while at the University of New South Wales' Embedded and Real-Time
Operating Systems Group using a variant of the L4 microkernel and the CAmkES component
architecture. It looks at ways that one could declaratively specify between-component
communication in a machine-readable way such that program-modifying optimisations could be
applied at build time (for example, by making use of zero-copy queues, or taking advantage of
architecture-specific notification mechanisms).
Consulting
I have significant commercial experience in a lot of domains. Recent work includes:
Digital signage, robustness and security: updated a digital signage system over thousands of
sites with hardware-enforced crash-proofing. Multi-server OpenGL-based system with texture
sharing
IOT upgrade: Updated an IOT Linux-based system deployed at several thousand sites to use an
A/B software update system. Full system includes centralised administration portal, atomic
upgrade with rollback
Mobile device diagnostics: reverse-engineered and implemented command line interface for
hardware diagnostics of Android-based mobile devices from well-known manufacturer
Selected open source
arm7: C++ templating experiment turned vestigial
ARM emulator
arduino-maple: getting a 2 Mbs protocol
working in software on a 16 MHz device
nim-hypervisor: hypervisor using Apple's
hypervisor.framework
ci20-os: operating system for a single-board
computer