Cybersecurity architect and engineering leader. This site publishes technical writing, talks and open-source projects from a career spanning endpoint security, distributed systems and identity.
Contents
- Blog — Articles on software engineering, JVM tuning, and more
- Code on GitHub — Public repositories and code samples
- Talks — Talks I’ve delivered as a guest speaker or at a conference
- Lectures — University course materials and lecture PDFs
- About me — Personal info and contact links
Blog
Articles on cybersecurity, engineering leadership, software architecture and system design.
- Cybersecurity — Endpoint protection, antimalware evolution and AV platform engineering.
- Management & Leadership — Engineering team habits, coaching and knowledge transfer.
- Design — API design principles, C++ patterns and architectural antipatterns.
- JVM Performance Tuning — Five-part series covering garbage collection, memory model and JVM diagnostics.
Code on GitHub
Here are public repos on GitHub that are in a presentable form.
- espresso lib - A hobby-horse project - i.e. an easy-to-use command-line parser for CLI applications.
- espresso tools - A collection of useful CLI tools, which leverages the espresso library.
- Examples - Simple code examples covering Sockets, MQTT, AMQP and REST, mostly written in Java/Spring and C/C++.
- Hello World! - Various implementations of the famous K&R “Hello World!” in different languages.
- Bash Shell Profile - Resource files for configuring your Bash Shell environment on Linux and UNIX.
Talks
Talks I’ve delivered at conferences, industry meetups and as a guest lecturer at university. PDF slides are available in the talks-public repository.
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Endpoint Security — Engineering Cybersecurity Solutions (October 2025)
Revised lecture for the Cyber Innovate class of 2025–26 at MTU. Expands coverage of endpoint security within a growing threat landscape, with engineering-focused sections on AV, EDR and ransomware. -
A Tour of Cybersecurity — AI Native Security (April 2025)
Delivered at the Lero Research Centre Industry Day 2025 conference at the University of Limerick, attended by 200+ delegates. Covers cybercrime costs, threat detection and the emerging role of AI in defence. -
Endpoint Security — Engineering Cybersecurity Solutions (September 2024)
Lecture for Cybersecurity postgraduate students at MTU. Covers the endpoint security landscape and uses a ransomware remediation-rollback solution as an engineering case study. -
Engineering Security Solutions — Rollback Remediation (November 2023)
Talk delivered at the Cork|Sec Meetup. Covers how AV works before diving into the engineering detail of building a ransomware rollback solution.
Lectures
I developed and delivered the anchor module for an MSc in Software Architecture & Design at MTU during 2017-2019 (formerly CIT - Cork Institute of Technology). The course covers distributed systems, middleware, database design, cloud architecture and IoT - eleven lectures with contributions from guest speakers from industry.
About Me
Architect and engineering leader specialising in cybersecurity and distributed systems. The last decade: endpoint protection platform engineering at McAfee and Malwarebytes; Senior Technology Strategist in the Office of the CTO at CrowdStrike, directing high-stakes technical initiatives and developer experience strategy; Zero Trust connectivity and IAM at Cerby. Before that, a career building backend and middleware systems across cellular network management, storage management and security platforms.
MSc in Distributed Systems. Developed and delivered a postgraduate module in Software Architecture & Design at Munster Technology University (2017–2018).
You can learn more about my professional background on LinkedIn or visit my about.me page.
Donnacha Forde