Joshua Cannon

An engineer crazy about good, clean, fun code (and colleagues).

Experience

Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure) - Anthropic

• Wrote the “poor-man’s build system approximation” - a system whose purpose was to be as absolutely as simple/invisible as possible while still providing most of the features of a “real” build system
  • Automatic dependency management, tooling, dependency scraping, and even a remote test cache - for peanuts compared to Bazel (and even Pants)
• Led/owned CI for the primary monorepo, with an emphasis on testing and merge queue strategy
  • Improved reliability, speed, cost, reproducibility, and the overall feedback loop
• Stood up the framework and rollout of powerful GitHub-Actions workflows, which balanced strict security requirements with maximum permissions
  • Ultimately increased security posture as well as developer velocity

Team Lead/Build Engineer - IBM WatsonX Orders (prior McD Tech Labs)

• Supported the entire engineering org in all things Build Engineering
• Migrated our core build tooling from Bazel to Pants, resulting in:
  • >10 Minutes saved on local and PR runs of the static analysis and test pipeline
  • Over twenty thousand of lines of BUILD metadata collapsed into 800
• Introduced several new static analysis tools to our toolkit to help catch issues early in the SDLC
• Pioneered the ability to dockerize any file with:
  • bit-wise reproduction capabilities
  • maximum leveraging of the docker layer cache, yielding fast re-builds
  • automatic dependency upgrades
• Resident “Pythonista” offering support and solutions to all engineers for our entire codebase

Overall, removed hurdles and blockages that were interrupting an engineer’s ability to focus on writing production-ready application code, while still increasing code quality and security.

Senior Software Engineer - National Instruments

• Led company-wide Python coding conventions and best practices group with an emphasis on automated tooling
• Aided the design and implementation of a new company-wide CI/CD pipeline with a focus on flexibility, performance, and ease-of-use
• Designed and implemented foundational C++ device API engine to replace outdated C-based implementation which resulted in better testing support, cleaner code, and in some cases 4x speed improvement
• Created/Maintained backport library of subset of “modern” C++ STL to be used with older compilers

Technical

Pantsbuild

Maintainer-emeritus of the Pantsbuild open source Build system

Programming Languages

Python: Expert-level experience with a wide swath of the Python ecosystem. From the interpreter and standard-library, to commonly-used libraries, to full-stack development, to tooling for static analysis, packaging, and testing.

Intermediate knowledge of C++, Rust, JS/TS

Education

2013-2016

BS, Computer Science; The University of Texas (Austin)

Shenanigans

• Repo: Advent of one-line-of Code 2023
• ⚡ Talk: PyOhio 2023 - Mommy, How Are Objects Made? - by Dunder Seuss
• Talk: North Bay Python 2023 - Oh the (Methods) You Can (Make): By Dunder Seuss
• Talk: PyTexas 2023 - A Build Engineer in a buildless lang
• ⚡ Talk: PyTexas 2023 - Two Snakes in a Trenchcoat - Descriptors
• Podcast: InfoQ 2022 - Enabling a Collaborative and Welcoming Open Source Community
• Blog: Pantsbuild blog (multiple)
• Blog: IBM Developer - Case study: Incrementally migrating a Python monorepo from Bazel to Pants

joshdcannon@gmail.com | GitHub:thejcannon | @thejcannon@fosstodon.org