Ryan Johnson

For anyone curious about the third thing I wanted to try implementing in Sguaba, I ended up writing it myself, and then having Claude suggest the tests. Worked quite well! Given the nuances involved in designing this mechanism (and I discovered more nuance as I went), I suspect it would have struggled quite a lot with implementing it from scratch 😅 https://lnkd.in/dSRm6Kxm

71

3 Comments

Here's the leadership strategy that propelled me to Principal Engineer at Google: "I push rocks down hills." This is the pithiest summary of Principal Engineer-ing that I've come up with, and it's a major part of how I approach exec-level engineering leadership. Moving up the career ladder as an engineer is about finding leverage: ways to produce more value per unit of time. You can grow your skills so you can handle harder projects and finish them faster. You can improve your judgment so you identify opportunities that produce more value for the effort. You can lead teams, so your skills and judgment get magnified across more contributors. One way to magnify your output as a leader is by turning a hard problem into an easy problem. Something I've observed over time is that it's a lot more challenging to start a project than to keep a project moving in the same direction. The first few commits, the project outline, the high-level architecture: these are the hardest and the most consequential challenges. Once the skeleton is in place, it's harder for a project to run off the rails. Starting projects is hard; maintaining that momentum is comparatively easy. This leads to the discipline of pushing rocks down hills. Your goal isn't to drive a project to completion; it's to impart enough momentum to the project that it will cross the finish line even if you stop paying attention to it. The goal is to build teams that don't need you. Don't build teams with yourself at the center: build teams with yourself on the outside. Once a problem is moving under its own momentum, it's no longer a high-leverage place to spend your time. You can move on. It's time to push a different rock down the hill. One consequence is that you will start more projects than you finish. Not because the projects *don't* finish, but because *you're* not the one driving them over the line. You need to have the humility to step back and give credit to the folks who finish the job. Scaling yourself means taking a smaller share of credit for a larger number of projects.

1,537

56 Comments

Ever logged into Gmail and found yourself already signed in to YouTube, Drive, and Docs? That’s SSO working behind the scenes. Let’s break down how it really works. How does SSO work? With the insurgence of decentralization, there arises a big problem of managing an increasing number of users across applications. A centralized login system can mitigate this issue significantly and that’s what SSO is. It allows user to access multiple applications while logging only once. Different SSO protocols share session information in different ways, but the essential concept is the same: there is a central domain through which authentication is performed, and then the session is shared with other domains in some way. There are several protocols to implement SSO, few noteworthy of those are as follows: 1. SAML is mostly used for enterprise applications and for web platforms only. As it is XML based, it becomes a bit tedious to use it in mobile platform settings, though some apps which uses legacy backend may still use SAML but generally, it is not preferred in current times. 2. OAuth2.0 3. OpenID Connect 4. Facebook Connect: mostly used in consumer-facing application. OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect are most commonly used given their compatibility and ease of use with both web and mobile platforms Workflow of SSO on the web: 1. User request access to a web app1. 2. Web app redirects the user to IDP, which checks if the user is not already logged in, if not it presents a login page. 3. After validating the user creds, IDP issues a token (Usually JWT) (other token alternatives being SAML assertion, bearer tokens, kerberos tickets, opaque tokens). 4. Web gets the token and grants access after validating it. 5. The user requests access to another app(web app2) in the same session. 6. Webapp2 redirects request to IDP. 7. IDP detects whether the user is already logged-in using cookies or browser session. 8. As there’s already an active session, IDP skips the login page and generates a new access token. 9. Web app2 grants access after validating it. Workflow of SSO in Mobile: 1. Mobile app presents user an IDP login webpage. 2. After successfully login, IDP responds with an authorization code. 3. Mobile app uses this authorization code to get the access token from the IDP’s token endpoint. IDP’s token endpoint typically requires : a) Auth code(received from the previous step) b) Client ID, client secret c) Grant type d) Redirect URI 4. IDP returns an access token (Usually JWT) to mobile app. 5. Mobile app uses this token for authentication in subsequent api calls. #systemdesign #interviewtips #coding

83

28 Comments

Gemini CLI key highlights for week of 7/14/2025 - 🎉 Gemini CLI v1 Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/gSKUpc4p - Show modified content on cancel (y-okt) - Confirmation shortcuts with number keys (miguelsolorio) - Detect and mitigate cognitive loops (SandyTao520) - Allow/exclude MCP servers to enable larger global MCP server lists (chrstnb). - Set default auth type for those who frequently switch - Ability to hide the banner (krikera) - \ + <enter>: Newline support for terminals that don’t support shift + enter (bbiggs) - --proxy: Provide a URL to proxy all requests (warjiang) - View MCP tool debug output in ctrl + o pane (bbiggs) - A massive amount of small improvements across the board. Upgrade to latest: v0.1.13 https://lnkd.in/giVzXQhz #GeminiCLI #Gemini #AI #OSS

51

1 Comment