Jon Phenow
Staff Software Engineer at Fly.io
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJon 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
Stackoverflow
4,034reputation
458kreached
10answers
37questions
Github Skills (42)
markdown10
ruby-rails10
devise10
javascript10
middleware10
expressjs10
saml10
technical-writing10
testing10
user-authentication10
authentication10
swagger10
rails10
fly10
io10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
saml-idp/saml_idp
Jul 2013 - Feb 2021
Ruby SAML Identity Provider, best used with Rails (though not required)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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.
identity-providerrailsruby-samlrubysaml
superfly/flyctl
Apr 2022 - Sep 2022
Command line tools for fly.io services
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:28 reviews, 35 commits, 38 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.
command-line-toolflyio-tools
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.