Eric Salo
Software Engineer at Google
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEric Salo is a seasoned software engineer with over three decades of systems-level experience and a 10+ year tenure at Google focused on Protocol Buffers, Search, and Linux networking. He prefers working close to the metal—C is his tool of choice—and has deep expertise in networking, multi-threaded programming, and constrained-resource high-performance systems. His long career spans supercomputing (SGI), real-time network appliances (Narus), and distributed infrastructure design, including a decade building a custom VM, compiler, and network stacks at eBureau. An active open-source contributor, he has improved protobuf and gRPC C implementations, fixing Unicode bugs and modernizing APIs. Based in Minneapolis, he combines pragmatic low-level craftsmanship with a track record of shipping robust, production-grade systems across hardware and cloud environments.
10 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Computer Science at Gustavus Adolphus CollegeMaster of Science (MS), Computer Science, Master of Science (MS), Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (14)
c1710
data-structures10
memory-management10
c-language10
c1110
cprogramming-language10
jsondecoder10
protobuf10
data-structure10
decoding10
grpc10
protocol-buffers10
utf9
api-design8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
protocolbuffers/upb
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
a small protobuf implementation in C
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 146 commits, 26 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Eric primarily contributed to the protobuf implementation in C, focusing on improving the JSON decoder and cleaning up the mini descriptor code. This involved fixing bugs related to Unicode handling in the JSON decoder and adding error handling, code clarity, and better memory management within the mini descriptor functionality. They also worked on the internal API for various object structures and related functions.
protocol-buffersprotobufflatbuffersprotobuf3protoc
grpc/grpc
Feb 2023 - Jan 2024
The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 PRs, 6 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Eric contributed to the gRPC repository by modifying the code to align with updates in the upb (upb = protobuf implementation) library. Their work involved replacing deprecated methods and functions, such as replacing `has_` methods with `_size` methods for map fields. They also updated variable names and refactored code to comply with the latest upb API changes. The user's changes touched various areas of the codebase, including xDS client code and xDS configuration parsing.
objective-ccpppythongrpcphp
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