Engineering
What Should an Identity Platform Do When Its Database Is Down?
The first time I watched this happen, the postmortem took four hours and produced one useful sentence.
Engineering
Engineering
What Happens When the Layer Below You Lies
There is a line in a thousand codebases that reads roughly like this:
Engineering
What Does One Login Actually Cost You?
Ask an engineering team what a login costs and you'll usually get a pause, then a question back: cost in what sense?
Engineering
What Actually Happens When You "Log In With Google"
You click a button. The page flickers through a couple of redirects. You're logged in.
Engineering
Understanding Tail Latency in Authentication
A team I worked with had a dashboard they were proud of. Login p50: 84ms. Login p99: 210ms. Both well inside budget, both green for months.
Engineering
Under the Hood of WebAuthn
Most WebAuthn explanations stop at the conceptual level: a keypair is created, the private key stays on the device, the server verifies a signature. That's correct, and it's roughly a tenth of what you need to implement a relying party without introducing a vulnerability.
Engineering
Why Token Introspection Isn't As Slow As You Think
The argument against opaque tokens takes about four seconds to make and it's the reason most teams never seriously consider them: "A network call on every request? No thanks."
Engineering
Token Exchange (RFC 8693): The Grant Type Nobody Teaches
Somewhere in your architecture there is a service that holds a token it should not be using.
Engineering
The Magic Behind Passkeys
Passkeys are explained badly almost everywhere. The usual description — "you log in with your face instead of a password" — isn't merely imprecise, it describes something that isn't happening. Your face is not sent anywhere. It isn't the credential. It's barely part of the protocol.
Engineering
The Lifecycle of an OAuth Client
Every OAuth deployment I've reviewed has a table of clients, and every one of those tables contains at least one row that nobody can explain.
Engineering
The Identity Tax: Why Every Enterprise Customer Costs More Than You Think
The pitch to the board is always the same: land an enterprise logo, and the ACV justifies whatever it took to close the deal. What that math usually leaves out is that the deal doesn't end at signature. It starts a slow-drip tax on the engineering roadmap that doesn't show up on the deal's own P&L,
Engineering
The Identity Platform I Wanted to Exist
Every identity platform I've worked with has asked me to make the same choice, and I've never been convinced the choice is real.