# jimjonah.dev — Identity Infrastructure & Security

Jim Jonah. Principal Software Engineer: identity and zero-trust, distributed systems, game dev, dev tools and AI.

## Building things that *other things* depend on.

I've spent 20+ years building systems across wildly different domains —
automotive, advertising, publishing, e-commerce platforms, distributed APM
tools, mainframe modernization, developer tools and music/movie e-commerce
infrastructure, and now identity systems. It's been fun working in a wide
variety of industries and domains; each taught me something different about
business, scaling and shipping.

Currently I'm a Principal Software Engineer at
[Veracode](https://veracode.com), working on the Identity Management and the
Trust platform.

A fun side project I've been working on is [detroit.games/euchre](https://detroit.games/euchre).

## A rough thread

### Identity & zero-trust

Recent work: a zero-trust architecture using a variety of OAuth 2.0 RFC
standards (DPoP, Token Exchange, Client Credentials, etc.) for humans and
agents; user management and RBAC at scale; and a rules engine for standards
compliance at [Veracode](https://veracode.com).

### Mainframe modernization

How do you convince developers to work on 40-year-old mainframe languages?
Eclipse plugins, editors, parsers and interpreters for COBOL, PL/I, JCL and
Rexx so that you'll have all of the same IDE features that you get when working
on Java or JavaScript.

How do you feel safe changing code that hasn't been touched in a decade? Impact
analysis across all of the programs, scripts and databases that are upstream
and downstream of the code block you need to change — even if you don't have
that code loaded in your IDE.

### APM & visualization

Distributed application performance monitoring. Graph-based tools for tracing
data flow through each of the systems involved in a transaction. I had fun
designing and building a new event-based architecture that allowed us to scale
from monitoring dozens of servers to thousands across multiple data centers.

### E-commerce & automotive

Turned around a failing project and delivered a white-label e-commerce system
for selling music and movies. JCPenney, Kmart, MTV and the US military were
the customers until Amazon took over the market.

I designed an automotive auction system for a company that had a unique twist
on that market.

### Interactive agency

Built Chrysler's web presence from zero and grew the team many times over. We
shipped code almost hourly on a daily basis.

## Elsewhere

- [Blog](https://jimjonah.dev/blog.md) — writing, in Markdown
- [Selected work](https://jimjonah.dev/projects.md)
- [About](https://jimjonah.dev/about.md)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jimjonah.dev)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/jimjonah)
- [RSS](https://jimjonah.dev/rss.xml)