Gabriel Handford
Staff Software Engineer at Instacart
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGabriel Handford is a Staff Software Engineer in California with 18 years of experience building secure, cross-platform systems and developer tools. A founding engineer at Keybase and co-founder of keys.pub, he has deep expertise in cryptography, key management, and secure messaging (Saltpack, Noise, FIDO2) alongside practical experience shipping desktop and mobile features in projects like Electron and Yelp. At Instacart’s AI Labs he now applies that security-first, systems-level thinking to production-ready AI infrastructure. His open-source work spans languages and layers—from Go keychain bindings and Objective-C YAJL integrations to crypto primitives and API examples—highlighting a knack for robust refactors, improved error handling, and concurrent-safe designs. Collected perspectives from founding startups and long-term product teams make him as comfortable designing protocols as iterating on UX-affecting native integrations.
18 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science at Cornell University
Github Skills (30)
json10
objective-c10
javascript10
c-language10
ios10
electron10
apidoc10
corefoundation10
security10
go10
keychain10
api10
cryptography10
macos10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
gabriel/yajl-objc
Mar 2009 - Oct 2021
Objective-C bindings for YAJL (Yet Another JSON Library) C library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 153 commits, 5 PRs in 12 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Gabriel primarily focused on debugging and implementing features for the Objective-C bindings for the YAJL (Yet Another JSON Library) C library. Their work included fixing performance tests, implementing new features to handle values correctly and adding support for streaming JSON parsing. The user made changes to both the core YAJLDecoder and the test files, showing a good understanding of the library and its integration.
c-libraryobjective-c
keybase/go-keychain
Sep 2015 - Dec 2019
Golang keychain package for iOS and macOS
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:46 commits, 11 PRs, 26 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Gabriel's contributions primarily focus on implementing and refining a Go package for interacting with the keychain on iOS and macOS. They refactored the code, introducing new methods and structures, improving the codebase's maintainability and clarity. The user also expanded the functionality by incorporating features such as the ability to set access groups, synchronize keychain items, and return results with different attributes, demonstrating a strong understanding of the underlying keychain APIs. Furthermore, the user made improvements to error handling and added tests to ensure the reliability of the package.
golangiosmacoskeychain
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