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.

All posts →

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.
• GitHub Repos - All public repos (mostly C/C++/Java but also some helper shell-scripts).

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.

• 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.

Full details and PDF slides are available here.

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