David Bolton

I'm a senior solutions engineer. Companies bring me their hardest technical problems before they've figured out how to describe them.

I work at Okta, currently focused on customer identity, though the problems rarely stay in one lane. Retail, healthcare, finance, public sector: the constant is taking a room full of half-formed requirements and turning them into an architecture a team can actually build.

I've also written a book on customer identity, Identity Is a Decision: how it evolved, how the protocols actually fit together, and how to build systems that survive contact with real users.

Stuff on my mind:

Identity as the real application boundary, not a login page.
What authorization even means when the user is an agent, not a person.
Demos that teach something instead of just looking impressive.
Learning guitar, which is mostly practice at being bad at something on purpose.
Rolling sushi, where the gap between good and embarrassing is about two millimeters.
Reading the top 50 classics slowly, with romantasy in between so it stays fun.

David Bolton

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