Jon Phenow is a Staff Software Engineer in Minneapolis with 15 years of experience improving software design, engineering tools, and team practices across startups and major platforms like GitHub and Microsoft. He blends hands-on backend and DevOps work—contributing to projects such as Fly.io's flyctl and documentation—with a focus on scalable, reliable systems and clearer developer experience. Jon has a deep Ruby/Rails background, evidenced by meaningful contributions to widely used projects like Devise and saml_idp, and practical middleware improvements for Express tooling. Colleagues rely on him to refactor tricky areas, tighten security-related flows, and translate platform complexity into clearer docs and deployable code. He’s equally comfortable shipping code and mentoring teams, driven by a philosophy that engineering and learning are continuous. Beyond the obvious, his open-source edits often target nuance—permission handling, CSRF cleanup, and precise user-facing wording—that materially reduce friction for operators and users.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts Computer Science at Saint John's University
Ruby SAML Identity Provider, best used with Rails (though not required)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:44 reviews, 246 commits, 94 PRs in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jon's contributions centered on building and refining the back-end infrastructure of the Ruby SAML Identity Provider. They worked on implementing key features like assertion building and integrating elements of broken-up building objects. The user also focused on improving existing code, such as tabbing and extracting unnecessary methods to enhance code structure and readability. These changes demonstrate a strong grasp of SAML and the associated Ruby libraries.
Contributions:21 reviews, 35 commits, 23 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Jon primarily focused on improving the `flyctl` command-line tool, contributing to both backend and infrastructure-related tasks. Their work involved integrating new error types from a forked GraphQL library and updating dependencies. They also addressed file permission requirements and refactored code related to logs and Postgres database management and deployment.
golangcommand-line-toolsflyio-toolsfly-iocli
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.