Alex Mckinney
Software Engineer at Ferry Health
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Mckinney is a Head of Engineering based in New York with 11 years of experience building developer-facing systems and distributed platforms. He has deep expertise in Protocol Buffers and CLI tooling, demonstrated by founding engineering roles at Buf and Fern and notable contributions to widely used open-source projects like bufbuild/buf and uber/prototool. Alex has led teams shipping language SDKs, compilers, and RPC systems (ConnectRPC/gRPC/REST) and has been a technical lead for Go platform frameworks used across hundreds of services. He blends hands-on backend development with product-driven leadership, having returned to lead engineering after Fern’s acquisition by Postman. Beyond production systems, he has taught intermediate programming courses, showing a knack for translating complex engineering concepts into practical learning.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Github Skills (14)
protoc10
buf10
go10
protobuffer10
protobuf10
grpc10
protocol-buffers10
cli10
refactor9
bufr9
refactoring9
command-line-interface8
command-line8
api-design8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
bufbuild/buf
Jan 2021 - Sep 2022
The best way of working with Protocol Buffers.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 369 reviews, 66 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the `bufbuild/buf` project by modifying the core logic and functionality of the CLI. They updated the CLI version and refactored core components. Their work focused on modifying the build and generation processes by integrating new plugin functionalities, like adding a java package prefix option and handling multi-line string literals, along with fixing edge cases within the file formatting logic.
protocol-buffersprotocgrpcprotobufbuf-cli
uber/prototool
May 2018 - Dec 2018
Your Swiss Army Knife for Protocol Buffers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 19 commits, 44 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily refactored and simplified code related to string manipulation utilities within the `prototool` project, optimizing internal functions and addressing code style issues. They enhanced the code base by adding functionality related to dry-run executions by adding flags to the CLI commands. Further, the user improved the codebase by implementing a file helper library, passing signals to protoc calls, and adding a fix flag to format command.
protocol-buffersprotobufprotocgrpcgrpc-go
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