About the Authors

Lee Brandt

Lee Brandt has spent two decades writing software professionally (and a few years unprofessionally before that), and he continues to learn every day. He has led teams in small and large companies and always manages to keep the business needs at the forefront of software development efforts and is currently a developer advocate at Okta. He speaks internationally about software development, from both a technical and business perspective, and loves to teach others what he learns. Lee writes software in Objective-C, JavaScript, and C#... mostly. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual Studio and Development Technologies and one of the directors of the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC). Lee is also a decorated Gulf War veteran, a husband, a proud pet parent, and loves to play the drums whenever he gets any spare time.

Keith Casey

Keith Casey currently serves on the platform team at Okta working on the Identity and Authentication APIs. Previously, he served as an early developer evangelist at Twilio and before that worked on the Ultimate Geek Question at the Library of Congress. His underlying goal is to get good technology into the hands of good people to enable great things. In his spare time, he helps build and support the Austin tech community, blogs at caseysoftware.com and is fascinated by monkeys. He is also a co-author of A Practical Approach to API Design (opens new window) from Leanpub.

Randall Degges

Randall Degges leads developer advocacy at Okta where he builds open source security libraries and helps make the Internet a little safer. Randall joined Okta from Stormpath and in a prior life, he was the CTO of OpenCNAM, the largest Caller ID API service. In his free time, Randall geeks out on web best practices, explores new technologies, and spends an inordinate amount of time writing Python, Node, and Go. As a fun fact, Randall runs ipify.org, one of the largest IP lookup APIs which serves over 30 billion requests per month.

Brian Demers

Brian Demers is a developer advocate at Okta, helping developers write secure Java applications. Brian is a Project Management Committee member for the Apache Shiro security project. Brian spends much of his day contributing to open source projects in the form of writing code, tutorials, blogs, and answering questions. Along with typical software development, he also has a passion for fast builds and automation.

Joël Franusic

Joël Franusic is a hacker and programmer-at-arms at Okta, where his job is to make simple things simple and complex things possible. Joël is a fan of literate programming, interactive development environments, and computer history. One of Joël's goals in life is to make all software from all of history available for instant use by any programmer. In his spare time Joël enjoys reading books and exploring interesting corners of computer history by doing things like writing a DNS server, programming an IBM 1401 using punch cards, and extracting all GIFs from Wikipedia.

Les Hazlewood

Les Hazlewood has a passion for HTTP and REST standards, application security, and large-scale system design. After moving to Silicon Valley to create a tech company, he gained a keen understanding of the challenges and rewards of working with both people and cutting-edge technology. He tries to channel that knowledge into making software and Internet standards better for everyone. Les has been actively involved in open source for more than 15 years, committing or contributing to projects like the Spring Framework, JBoss, Apache Shiro, JJWT, and many more. He is a senior software architect at Okta as well as the Ion Hypermedia Working Group Chair and Apache Shiro Project Management Committee Chair, and the former co-founder and CTO of Stormpath, the first API-driven Identity Management SaaS. Les has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and practices Kendo and studies Japanese when he's not coding.

Sai Maddali

Sai Maddali is a product manager on Okta's directories team where he is helping build the platform for customers to connect to Okta from various sources. He's spent his entire career in the identity space, coming to Okta from Stormpath where he worked as an engineer supporting developer success, and helped onboard developers to Stormpath's API and SDKs. Sai has a BS in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech and is passionate about all things identity and user experience. He spends his free time doing street photography centered around people and their identities. You can find Sai on Medium and Twitter as @saimaddali.

Matt Raible

Matt Raible is a well-known figure in the Java community and has been building web applications for most of his adult life. For over 20 years, he has helped developers learn and adopt open source frameworks and use them effectively. He's a web developer, Java Champion, and developer advocate at Okta. Matt has been a speaker at many conferences worldwide, including Devoxx Belgium, Devoxx France, Jfokus, and JavaOne. He is the author of The JHipster Mini-Book, Spring Live, and contributed to Pro JSP. He is frequent contributor to open source and a member of the JHipster development team. You can find Matt online at https://raibledesigns.com and @mraible on Twitter.