About

I’m just a happy programmer that likes to hack stuff.

I’ve been writing software since I was 12, and this site is where I write about it – programming, security, developer tools, and whatever I’ve been experimenting with lately. Sometimes that’s a rant about local storage or JSON Web Tokens. Sometimes it’s a more personal experiment, like whether music actually helps me focus, how I use journaling, or how much electricity my laptop is burning.

What I enjoy most is building things that other programmers actually want to use. Elegant developer services, documentation that doesn’t make you want to close the tab, SDKs that feel obvious. I like teaching that stuff too, especially web authentication and cryptography, and I’ve been writing here (on and off) for a long time.

These days I spend a lot of my time architecting agents and automations, experimenting with AI, and trying to build the highest quality products humanly possible.

Today I work at Snyk as VP of AI Engineering. I joined in 2021 to lead developer and security relations, and moved into my current role in 2025. I also advise a couple of developer-focused companies – mainly WorkOS and Arcade.dev – on developer relations, content, and how they show up for programmers. I used to do the same kind of advisory work at Onehouse and Builder.io. I also formerly helped Ragie, until Ticketmaster acquired them in 2026, and StepZen, until IBM acquired them in 2023.

Before Snyk I spent about four years at Okta leading developer advocacy, and before that I was the first developer evangelist at Stormpath, where I helped build the libraries, docs, and community around a developer authentication service.

Earlier on I was CTO at Telephony Research Services in Los Angeles. I wore a lot of hats there: I helped build and grow OpenCNAM (a caller ID API for developers), worked on telephony and teleconferencing systems, and learned a lot about shipping and marketing products myself. Before that I was a lead professional services engineer at Fonality, working on Trixbox CE – an open-source Linux distribution, built on Asterisk, that businesses used to run their phone systems.

A lot of my favorite work has been open source or free for developers to use. I built ipify, a reverse-IP API that millions of applications have relied on. I wrote PassProtect, a library and browser extension that warns you if a password you’re typing has shown up in a breach (powered by Have I Been Pwned). I built postgression to provision a real PostgreSQL database for your tests, so you don’t have to run and babysit a local server. At Stormpath I wrote security libraries in Python, Node, and Go, and in 2012 I published The Heroku Hacker’s Guide.

I started a computer science degree at UC Santa Cruz in 2006. I was a terrible student and dropped out after two years. Almost everything I know about programming I taught myself.

I live in Bend, Oregon these days, though I still spend a lot of time in San Francisco and traveling for work. I’m married to my wife Samantha, and we have a super cute dog named Dandelion.

If you want to say hi, email me at r@rdegges.com.