As a Distinguished Engineer for Ping Identity, Brian aspires to one day know what a Distinguished Engineer actually does for a living. In the meantime, he's tried to make himself useful with little things like designing and building much of PingFederate, the product that put Ping Identity on the map, and developing jose4j, the popularish open source JWT library. When not making himself useful, he attempts to build a legacy by sneaking his name onto specification documents that very few people will actually ever read, including various identity and security related standards in the IETF, OpenID Foundation and OASIS. He holds a B.A., magna cum laude, in Computer Science from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Despite spending four years in the state, he has to look up how to spell "Massachusetts" every time he writes it.