Mehrdad Afshari is a founder and seasoned backend engineer with 15 years of experience building and hardening distributed systems from the Bay Area (Portola Valley, CA). As CEO of Signeen he blends product leadership with hands-on engineering, particularly around backend automation and dependency management. His open-source contributions to high-profile projects like grpc and grpc-go show a focus on developer experience, code quality (adding Pylint and sanity tests), and pragmatic performance improvements such as memory optimizations and server reflection features. He’s comfortable operating across languages and tooling—Python, Go, Protobuf, and Docker—while upgrading complex build and CI surfaces. Colleagues would describe him as the kind of founder who still dives into code to unblock teams and reduce technical debt. Notably, his attention to small improvements (typo fixes and canonicalization) reflects an engineer who values both correctness and maintainability.
The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)
Role in this project:
Backend & Automation Engineer
Contributions:22 releases, 2 reviews, 639 commits in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mehrdad primarily worked on integrating tools for code analysis and upgrading dependencies within the gRPC project. They added Pylint to the sanity tests, improving code quality checks, and updated Python scripts to work with Protobuf 3.2.0. Furthermore, the user updated Python protobuf dependency versions in several setup files and Docker configuration files. They also implemented functionalities related to server reflection services.
The Go language implementation of gRPC. HTTP/2 based RPC
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:7 commits, 10 PRs, 5 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Mehrdad contributed to the gRPC-Go implementation by addressing various aspects of the codebase. They implemented a new `EmptyCallOption`, fixed comment spelling, and canonicalized the URL prefix in multiple files. Additionally, they optimized the code through memory management by setting pointers to nil for garbage collection and addressed a minor typo. This indicates a focus on improving code quality and usability within the gRPC framework.
golangnanoservicesrpcprotoprotobuf
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