MICHAEL FORDE

ST Engineering Idirect — Software Engineer

[ CURRENT ]

Working on innovative 5G solutions for satellite communications infrastructure.

Intel — Software Engineer

Developed and maintained Windows drivers for Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) — a hardware-integrated workload accelerator providing high-throughput compression and asymmetric/symmetric encryption offload directly in silicon.

Drove performance improvements by optimising the driver for NUMA-aware systems, improving locality between CPU, memory, and accelerator resources to reduce overhead and increase throughput under real workloads. I was also the subject matter expert for telemetry, owning the instrumentation and performance visibility needed to diagnose bottlenecks, validate changes, and give other teams better insight into QAT behaviour.

C Windows Kernel PCIe NUMA Telemetry Cryptography Compression

Quartx — Managing Director & Co-Founder

Co-founded Quartx with my uncle — a B2B data analytics SaaS aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises. The company grew directly from the Call Monitoring project (see Projects) and expanded into a broader tool for business intelligence.

Wore every hat: built the product, sold it to customers, handled onboarding and support, managed finances, and iterated on direction based on real customer feedback. Quartx went on to serve many SMEs, giving them full visibility into call traffic patterns, peak hours, missed call rates, and staff performance data.

Python Django PostgreSQL SaaS Entrepreneurship

Netsoc UCC — Events Officer / SysAdmin

UCC's networking and technology society. Joined as a sysadmin — responsible for maintaining a fleet of society-owned servers, managing user accounts, and keeping services running for the membership base.

Gave numerous tech talks ranging from beginner-friendly "How to Build a Website" sessions to more niche deep-dives like "The History of Telephone Hacking." In final year, elected as Events Officer — planned and executed over 50 events across the academic year, including workshops, hackathons, and speaker nights.

Linux Networking Sysadmin Public Speaking

CloudCIX — Junior Software Developer

Worked on two main products: an S3-compatible object store built with Django, designed to offer cost-effective cloud storage with broad AWS S3 ecosystem compatibility. Also contributed to an in-house cloud orchestration platform — a Django-based system used by customers to provision and manage virtual machines on CloudCIX infrastructure.

Good early exposure to cloud architecture, REST API design, and working within a production codebase as part of a professional engineering team.

Python Django S3 Cloud REST API

Dishy

[ Satellite / TUI ]

A terminal UI dashboard for monitoring your Starlink dish in real time. Dishy connects directly to the dish via gRPC, polling live metrics every second and rendering them as sparkline charts and data tables — all from your terminal.

The dashboard is fully dynamic: panels can be added, removed, and zoomed to fullscreen on the fly. Available panels cover downlink and uplink throughput, latency, packet drop rate, signal-to-noise ratio, obstruction percentage, device info, network stats, and a timestamped connection event log. The adaptive grid layout automatically reflows as panels are added or removed.

Call Monitoring

[ SaaS / Telephony Analytics ]

A standalone phone call analytics platform built as a SaaS product. Started as a side project in late 2019 and grew into a fully productised service with 10+ paying customers using it daily. The platform captures inbound and outbound call data, provides dashboards for traffic analysis, and gives businesses actionable insight into how calls flow through their organisation.

This project became the foundation for Quartx.

Streamlined Throughput Prediction

[ ML / Continual Learning / Adaptive Streaming ]

Final year research project investigating Continual Learning for cellular network throughput prediction. Built a continuous learning pipeline capable of predicting network throughput over a 10-second horizon with high accuracy — adapting to dynamic network conditions over time without full retraining.

Integrated the prediction model into a custom adaptive video streaming app using DASH to dynamically adjust bitrate based on predicted throughput, resulting in measurably reduced buffering.

SimpleTTS

[ Accessibility / Python ]

A text-to-speech utility written in Python. Captures highlighted text from anywhere on screen, sends it to Google's TTS engine, and plays back the resulting audio via PyAudio. Built to help myself with reading — I'm dyslexic, and this made consuming text-heavy content significantly easier.