When I decided to transition away from being a Principal Enterprise Architect into a specialized identity engineering role, a number of my colleagues asked me why. My answer has always been this: Because, for the last five or six years, every project I’ve done has been an identity project—we just didn’t know it when we started. That response is usually met with a nodding head and a resigned, weary shrug. Too often, it fails to...

Read more

The World-Wide Web, as we know it, started around 1993 by serving static HTML files with links to other HTML files. It didn’t take long for developers to find ways of making websites more “dynamic” using technologies like Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Perl, and Python. Since the ’90s, I have built web applications using a variety of languages, platforms, and frameworks. I’ve written application frameworks, content management systems, a blog engine, and a social media...

Read more

If you’re like me, the most aggravating thing is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly describes the issue you are facing, only to scroll down and see that it has remained unanswered since 2011. I was recently trying to configure Transport Layer Security (TLS) client authentication (also referred to as mutual SSL) between two internal services at Okta and found the lack of complete examples astonishing. I hope that this blog post provides a...

Read more

Okta has been an agile development shop since the beginning. One important aspect of being agile is enabling a mix of bottom-up and top-down decision making. Specifically where high level vision and strategy is clearly communicated enabling teams to autonomously deliver value while also feeding back learnings from the trenches to inform the high level goals.1 Below are the tacit engineering design principles we’ve used to guide development at Okta. They continue to evolve as...

Read more