James Woolfenden
Smokejumper - Office Of The Chief Product Officer at Palo Alto Networks
Reading, England, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Woolfenden is a veteran DevSecOps practitioner with 14+ years delivering secure, automated CI/CD and cloud infrastructure across startups and high-traffic enterprise sites. Currently at Palo Alto Networks' Office of the Chief Product Officer, he prototypes AI-driven security applications while previously helping scale Bridgecrew (and contributing heavily to Checkov and Yor) after writing the Bridgecrew Terraform provider in Go. He specializes in bringing order to chaotic development environments—implementing IaC, container orchestration, and deployment pipelines—and has led small teams as SCRUM master, technical lead and manager. A prolific open-source contributor, he was the largest SAST rules author for Checkov and has built security tooling like Pike and Sato that solve real-world IaC and IAM problems. Comfortable across Go, Python and many automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, Packer, ARM/CloudFormation), he combines deep hands-on engineering with a knack for product-focused R&D. Based in Reading, UK, he blends enterprise transformation experience with startup pragmatism and cross-platform interoperability expertise.
14 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc. Applied Marine Science, M.Sc. Applied Marine Science at University of Plymouth
French, German
Stackoverflow
6,603reputation
791kreached
181answers
8questions
powershell
top-5%
terraform
top-5%
jenkins
top-5%
msbuild
top-1%
tfs
top-5%
teamcity
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
cloud-computing10
python10
msbuild10
terraform10
terraformer10
go10
infrastructure-as-code10
devops10
tagging9
teamcity9
windows9
visual-studio9
tfs9
jenkins9
powershell9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
bridgecrewio/checkov
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Prevent cloud misconfigurations and find vulnerabilities during build-time in infrastructure as code, container images and open source packages with Checkov by Bridgecrew.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:131 reviews, 903 commits, 431 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to improving the infrastructure-as-code of the project by introducing support for Windows operating systems, including the implementation of batch files and cmd scripts. The user also enhanced cross-platform compatibility and dependency management by addressing related issues. In addition to infrastructure changes, the user was involved in writing checks for code quality, and has contributed towards testing, security, and logging aspects of the system.
checkovcontainer-imageinfrastructure-as-codevulnerabilitiesterraform
bridgecrewio/yor
Apr 2021 - Jan 2023
Extensible auto-tagger for your IaC files. The ultimate way to link entities in the cloud back to the codified resource which created it.
Role in this project:Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure Engineer
Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure EngineerContributions:22 reviews, 20 commits, 19 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `yor` project by modifying and enhancing its Terraform integration capabilities. This involved updating the `terraform-config-inspect` dependency and incorporating support for new features, specifically for tagging Scalr.io module references and local modules. Furthermore, the user worked on adding support for GCP labels within modules and resolving file-handling issues on Windows systems, showing a focus on cross-platform compatibility. These contributions indicate a deep understanding of IaC practices and cloud infrastructure management.
auto-taggercloudsecuritydevopsserverlesscloud
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