2022 Race Report (the shorter version) — If you want to read the longer, play-by-play version, check out my other blog post. I originally signed up for the Zion 100k in 2020, but it got cancelled and I deferred my entry until this year. The race doesn’t actually run through Zion National Park (I don’t think the…

I recently started investigating authentication and quickly realized that the space is a mire of acronyms, overlapping terms, and imprecise language making the whole area very confusing. In this article, I explain what I learned and walk through some of the terminology and concepts. However, before we get into any…

I was at a conference recently where this exact question came up. As might be expected, there was not a consensus. First of all, there are two impediments to answering this question cleanly. The first is that titles across companies do not mean the same thing (a quick look at…

I recently ran Quicksilver 50k which takes place in a park not too far from where we live. It’s also the same race that I ran my first 100k at (and predictably repeats half of the 100k course). As I was running this race, I had a lot of memories…

To get a more general background in authorization, check out my previous posts about Attribute-Based Access Control and our authorization investigation at Split. This post is specific to implementing the PEP piece of an ABAC system or the equivalent in a Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC) system. If you’re implementing an…

I love status codes. I always felt like I’d finally be a real expert at APIs if I could make status code jokes. While my favorite status code is definitely 418, there’s a special place in my heart for 404. At one of my previous companies, 404 was my employee…

It seems like everyone building web software is also building REST APIs and nearly all of those REST APIs use HTTP. Despite that, a lot of developers still struggle with the correct usage of HTTP. The two most common problems I see are with status codes and with HTTP methods…

I have attended many women in tech and diversity in leadership events over the years. I’ve started to notice that there is a very dangerous message that seems to come up at nearly every single event. That message is that women and minorities need to change to fit into the…

And Why You Should Care — Last November I started a new job at Split as an engineer on our main Core Backend team. We are in the business of feature flags! Unlike when I was at Box, however, I’m finding that it’s a bit harder to explain what our company does — especially to non-engineers…