Figure 1: The Infamous Mel

Hello, and welcome to the homepage of Mel Young.

I’m a 23 year old 🇦🇺 Australian PhD researcher at Macquarie University’s Silicon Platforms Lab, based out of Sydney.

Thanks for stopping by my website, I hope you enjoy your stay here!

What am I working on?

My research focus concerns the design and verification of radiation-hardened microprocessors for spaceflight applications. I’m currently designing a novel high-performance rad-hard Digital Signal Processor (DSP) System on Chip (SoC) based on the RISC-V ISA, and verifying it using formal methods. I’m also working on contributing to, and modifying, free and open-source EDA tools for rad-hard design purposes.

You may also be interested to see my list of projects.

What am I interested in?

For the past few years, my main interest has been computer engineering/digital design: processor design, EDA techniques and digital ASIC design. Nowadays, this has mostly converged on the design of fault-tolerant microprocessors. That being said, I also remain interested in a lot of other things! To list them off:

• Robotics
• Computer graphics
• Retro computing/emulation
• High-performance and distributed computing
• Gamedev (mostly engine development)
• Cybersecurity (binary exploitation and reverse engineering)
• Data compression, file formats, and serialisation
• Lexers and parsers
• Embedded systems

I have worked or continue to work in a number of the above areas.

Generalising the specific fields above into a more broad statement, I care the most about:

• When I feel like I’m doing something complex and novel
• A solution being efficient. I’m deeply passionate about computational efficiency (and efficiency in general), and desire to extract all the performance I can from a system I’m designing while using as little resources as possible
• When I’m able to solve problems creatively, in new and interesting ways
• My work having a visible impact; it solves real problems for real people, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something significant

Where have I been before?

Before moving to Sydney, I lived for 22 years in Brisbane, Australia - my home town.

Previously, I completed my undergraduate Bachelor of Computer Science degree between Feb. 2021 and July 2024, at the University of Queensland. After that, I completed my Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) degree also at UQ, between July 2024 and November 2025, where I wrote the TaMaRa algorithm.

For 3 years I worked as an intern and then later Graduate Software Engineer at Emesent, a 3D LiDAR mapping company for GPS denied environments. I was a member of the SLAM team (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), and worked to maintain our in-house CSIRO-derived Wildcat SLAM system. My work there focused around bringing up new sensors, optimising and improving the C++ codebase, and earlier, maintaining the company’s internal payload calibration system.

Trivia

Hobbies

• I enjoy scuba diving!
  • Qualifications: PADI Rescue Diver, PADI Advanced Open Water Scuba Diver, have ~80 dives
  • Partially completed twin-set technical diving training
• I’m pretty interested in audio engineering, voice acting and music production, and occasionally make bad noises in Reaper (which I do actually own a licence for, and you should too!)
• I’m a big fan of electronic music, especially DnB; and also metal/metalcore
• I also every now and then write screenplays and short stories, particularly in the horror/cyberpunk genre
  • I might publish some of these here… someday…. maybe :)

Nerd stuff

• I daily drive Arch Linux (btw 🤓), and use KDE Plasma 6 as my desktop environment
• I use Neovim as my editor!
  • Check out my le epic dotfiles if you’re so inclined
• I use WezTerm as my terminal emulator
• I have a very small homelab setup consisting of Tailscale and a second hand Dell Optiplex that runs various services on Fedora
• Although I’m not an electrical engineer by trade, I do like to tinker with electronics, including dumping and archiving firmware and ID’ing microcontrollers

Personal stuff

• I’ve got autism spectrum disorder level 1 (in case you couldn’t tell already lol)
• I also have dyscalculia, aka “dyslexia for maths”
• I am bisexual 🏳️‍🌈
• I am nonbinary
• I use they/them pronouns
  Huh?

  I’m pretty chill and I’m not gonna yell at you, but I do prefer they/them pronouns.

  If you’re confused or mad, please consider reading this first: I’m nonbinary. What does that mean?

Find me elsewhere

• GitHub (slowly moving to Codeberg)
• Codeberg
• WakaTime
• Internet Archive
• OpenStreetMap
• last.fm
• Mastodon
• Matrix: @mlyoung:fossi-chat.org
  • Not always checked!
• Email: mel.humansignorethis at mlyoung dot cool
  • Prohibited emails: AI slop, SaaS slop, web design/web development roles
  • Sending these will result in your entire domain being perma-blocked from my mail server

If you want to contact me, I suggest you email me.

Buttons and blinkies!

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Privacy policy and GDPR (tl;dr I don’t track you, but third parties might)