I joined Buf to work in developer relations. This is a change from what I have been doing. I’ve usually been making in-house tooling and API services, and writing was related to side projects. I started writing this blog as a hobby and as a vehicle to develop my skills (both in writing and as a SWE). For a long time, I felt writing was a weak area of mine. I previously shied away from it because I figured I had nothing useful to say. I think that used to be true, but over the years, I have gained enough real experience to add some genuine flavor to my ideas here.

I have tracked down bugs that were unknowingly causing millions of dollars in lost revenue per month. I have contributed features to open source projects and run a few of my own. I have dug into obscure TLS extension issues and maintained forks of Go to support legacy network equipment. I have performed every role needed to get real services into production. While I’d rather not share a lot of specific details or name the companies where these events took place, I have worked at enough places that stories like these just… happen. I’m sure many other experienced software engineers would be able to share similar stories over a beer.

Since starting at Buf, I’ve posted several blogs on the Buf blog. I’ve also adapted protobuf.kmcd.dev to be suitable for protobuf.com. That’s right, protobuf.com is now a learning website for Protobuf. I have a few more ideas on how to expand it to be a bit more engaging. The goal is to introduce Protobuf in a way that is approachable to people. The language-focused tutorials do a good job of getting people generating and running code, but with WASM, my idea is that you can start getting real experience with Protobuf with zero setup.

That said, with this new role, my posting cadence on this blog will change. I will likely be publishing here less often, probably around once a month. My focus will also shift more toward network protocol exploration rather than Protobuf and ConnectRPC. If you want to read more about schema-first development and Protobuf/gRPC/ConnectRPC, you can find that on buf.build/blog. There will be plenty to read about those subjects there!