Josh Elsasser
Senior Software Developer at AppNeta
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJosh Elsasser is a Senior Software Developer based in Vancouver with 11 years of hands-on experience in C/C++ systems and Linux kernel development, currently building robust networking and packaging infrastructure at AppNeta. He combines low-level kernel work with practical build and release engineering—Debian/macOS packaging, Makefiles, and TeamCity pipelines—bringing projects from prototype to production. An active open-source contributor, Josh has improved Emacs LSP client parsing and language-server integrations (notably lsp-mode and cquery), addressing tricky multibyte parsing and initialization edge cases that improve editor interoperability. He’s equally comfortable teaching core CS topics and iterating on large codebases, and is known for careful, prideful craftsmanship that surfaces in both system reliability and developer tooling.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at The University of British ColumbiaDiploma Program, Diploma Program at International Baccalaureate
Github Skills (8)
c-language10
elisp10
language-server-protocol10
cprogramming-language10
emacs10
emacs-lisp9
configuration-management9
build-automation8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
jacobdufault/cquery
Nov 2017 - May 2018
C/C++ language server supporting multi-million line code base, powered by libclang. Emacs, Vim, VSCode, and others with language server protocol support. Cross references, completion, diagnostics, semantic highlighting and more
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 3 PRs, 20 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Josh made several contributions to improve the functionality and configuration of the `cquery` language server. They implemented features to support Emacs integration by adjusting initialization parameters, specifically adding a custom setting for the cache directory. Furthermore, the user introduced an option to disable progress reports during indexing. Lastly, they made updates to ensure correct file path expansion and compliance with language server protocol standards.
vimcross-referenceshighlightingmillionsemantic-highlighting
emacs-lsp/lsp-mode
Nov 2017 - Mar 2018
Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 20 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Josh contributed to the core functionality of `lsp-mode`, primarily focusing on improvements to the parsing and initialization of the Language Server Protocol client. They addressed parsing issues related to multibyte character chunks and refined the code to use character positions rather than visual columns. Furthermore, they implemented support for `initializeOptions` parameters, allowing for more flexible server initialization, and refactored parts of the codebase. Their changes aimed to improve the robustness and flexibility of the LSP client.
pythoneslintlanguage-server-clientclient-libraryjavascript
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