Bridging the Senior SWE to Staff Divide: Part 1 — While all promotions have challenges, from my experience and from watching and working with others, one of the most challenging promotions is moving from a Senior Software Engineer to a Staff Software Engineer. Advancing from entry-level to Senior SWE focuses primarily on becoming more independent and being able to solve…

Originally posted September 2021 on the Split Blog When writing APIs, REST (short for representational state transfer) is considered the standard. And yet, REST itself isn’t actually a standard. This makes designing intuitive REST APIs tricky to get right. It is a way of thinking or an art form more…

Audit logs are a feature every enterprise customer wants in every product they use. Customers need to know who changed which settings and at what time. They need to know when someone creates a user account in their company’s instance of your product, who accessed what data, and more. If…

Race Report 2022 (The full version) — Note that this is my really long version (mostly written for myself). You may be more interested in my shorter version. I originally registered for this race because my friend Cory signed up and talked me into signing up as well in 2020 but like all the other races that…

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…