Josh Humphries
Protobuf Connoisseur at Buf
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJosh Humphries is a seasoned software engineer and engineering leader with 14+ years building highly scalable, distributed systems in Java and Go, currently focused on Protocol Buffers and gRPC as a Protobuf Connoisseur at Buf. He has led teams of 3–10 engineers and held senior roles at FullStory, Square, and Google, pairing hands-on backend work with technical leadership. Josh is a prolific open-source contributor to foundational projects like protobuf, grpc-go, and buf, where he’s improved parsing robustness, JSON/Any handling, server reflection, and build/tooling for real-world interoperability. His deep expertise spans concurrency, Java annotation processing and type-system quirks, microservices, and both relational and NoSQL stores (Oracle, Zookeeper, Redis, Kafka). Based in Atlanta, he combines a systems-first mindset with practical build/release and tooling experience—often surfacing subtle correctness and stability fixes that benefit broad developer communities.
14 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Georgia Institute of Technology
Github Skills (42)
kotlin10
dependency-management10
json10
reflection10
tls1210
grpc-gateway10
protocol-buffers10
testing10
data-serialization10
schema-design10
tls1310
java10
serialization10
protoc10
mtls10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
fullstorydev/grpcui
Dec 2018 - Feb 2022
An interactive web UI for gRPC, along the lines of postman
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 51 reviews, 65 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily worked on adding and maintaining features to the gRPC UI tool. Their contributions included implementing CSRF protection, adding Go modules for build support, fixing issues related to -unix flag and adding more flags, incorporating newer libraries for grpcurl, fixing range validations, and modifying the code to show error details. The user also updated dependencies and fixed deprecations.
golangweb-uilinesgrpcinteractive-web
fullstorydev/grpcurl
Nov 2017 - Feb 2022
Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 releases, 51 reviews, 101 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Josh's contributions primarily involve improving the `grpcurl` tool, which is used to interact with gRPC servers. The commits focus on enhancing the handling of gRPC connections, including addressing TLS handshake issues and improving error messages. The user also modified the `grpcurl` tool to support binary headers and added functionality for message templates. These changes demonstrate an understanding of gRPC, protobuf, and the underlying network and security considerations in gRPC communication.
golangcommand-line-toolprotobufgrpccurl
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