Joshua Cannon
An engineer crazy about good, clean, fun code (and colleagues).
Experience
Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure) - Anthropic [01/2024 - ]
- 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
Build Engineer - IBM WatsonX Orders (prior McD Tech Labs) [07/2021 - 01/2024]
- 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 [05/2014 - 07/2021]
- 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- Designed and implemented foundational C++ device API engine to replace outdated C-based implementation which resulted in better testing support, cleaner code, and in some cases 4x speed improvement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
joshdcannon@gmail.com | GitHub:thejcannon | @thejcannon@fosstodon.org