Phil Cohen
Co-Founder, Principal at Mutations Limited
Truckee, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPhil Cohen is a seasoned software engineer and entrepreneur with 16+ years building scalable, secure systems across startups and Fortune 500 clients. As co-founder and principal of Mutations Limited and founder of Binary Trees and Hosting Paradigms, he blends hands-on backend development, operations, and network architecture to deliver production-grade web and enterprise applications. He has led engineering teams, designed payment gateways processing hundreds of millions, and improved infrastructure at companies like Shopify and Fastly while driving PCI and security initiatives as a CTO. Technically fluent across Ruby, C#, Perl, UNIX/Linux platforms, and databases (Postgres, MySQL, Percona), he contributes to notable open-source projects—improving SAML robustness and Percona cookbook support and strengthening test suites for Rails. Phil teaches programming, speaks about ops and tooling, and uniquely pairs deep systems administration experience with test-driven, agile development practices. Based in Truckee, CA, he favors automating large-scale deployments and pragmatic engineering trade-offs that keep systems reliable under real-world load.
16 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
State University of New York College at Potsdam
English, Spanish
Github Skills (23)
ruby-rails10
cookbook10
percona10
mysql10
saml10
testing10
rspec10
rails10
database-administration10
capybara10
ruby10
chef-client10
nokogiri10
chef-solo10
base6410
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
sous-chefs/percona
Jul 2011 - Jun 2015
Development repository for the percona cookbook
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:439 commits, 98 PRs, 52 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the `percona` cookbook, focusing on configuring and maintaining Percona MySQL databases. Their work involved setting default server roles, fixing typos, and updating dependencies. They implemented changes to use specific package installations and refactored access grants. The user also added support for XtraBackup and initial support for XtraDB cluster configurations.
cookbookmysqlperconachef-resourcemysql-database
SAML-Toolkits/ruby-saml
Dec 2014 - Apr 2015
SAML SSO for Ruby
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs, 97 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily focused on improving the `ruby-saml` library's performance and robustness. Their contributions included enhancing thread safety in schema validation, optimizing base64 encoding/decoding, and removing redundant code. They also refactored and cleaned up existing methods while ensuring consistent code formatting and adding documentation to the `Utils` methods. These changes collectively aimed to increase the efficiency and maintainability of the SAML library.
railssaml-ssorubysamlsso
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