Joshua Cannon
Staff Software Engineer at Airbnb
Arlington, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Cannon is a Staff Software Engineer with a decade of experience building developer tooling and backend systems, currently at Airbnb after contributing to Anthropic and leading work on Pantsbuild. He specializes in Python build systems and reliability, having shipped major Pants features like Asset Inference and performance-minded refactors that cut boilerplate and sped up lint/format workflows. Joshua is a prolific open-source contributor with impactful fixes and features across high-profile projects including pants, pip, pex, and Python PEPs, and has improved testing and preprocessor behavior in googletest. He pairs deep hands-on engineering—migrating large orgs from Bazel to Pants and resolving deadlocks and subtle resolver bugs—with a passion for teaching maintainable code and raising team fluency in Python tooling. An Arlington, Texas–based engineer, he often gravitates toward projects that reduce developer friction and scale code hygiene across large codebases.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
Github Skills (13)
unit-testing10
dependency-management10
pip10
test-framework10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
pytest10
python10
testing10
documentation9
mocking9
packaging9
build-automation7
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
pantsbuild/pants
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023
The Pants Build System
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:87 releases, 1592 reviews, 257 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Joshua made several contributions to the Pants Build System, primarily focusing on Python code improvements. Their work included adding new functionality by implementing features like the `--unowned-dependency-behavior` option for Python import statements and providing the `pex_binaries` target generator. Furthermore, the user addressed critical bugs, notably one concerning the incorrect application of `--log-levels-by-target`.
pythonprotobufaws-lambdapantsshell
pex-tool/pex
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
A tool for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files, lock files and venvs.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:21 reviews, 5 commits, 7 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Joshua contributed to the `pex-tool/pex` repository by addressing several issues related to the tool's functionality and stability. They fixed a deadlock error, updated dependencies like black, and ensured proper behavior when running in interpreter mode. The user also refactored code to improve the export process and sorting of requirements.
executablepexpython
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