[Building Engage] #5. Working with unstructured data

Here is a fairly rough checklist of things you should think of when building an email/password authentication system for a fairly sensitive application. This assumes the basics like securely hashing passwords, proper session management, and transmitting data over SSL are already covered. For a more comprehensive list, see the OWASP Cheat Sheet on...

I have been moving a lot of Engage’s architecture to Kafka of late. Even though the monolithic side has been winning the microservice vs monolithic debate in recent times, I am still a big fan of serverless microservices—using PaaS (we use Google Cloud) to host microservices. To be fair, what we do is more of a serverless architecture than a...

2022 was rough. The year started with lots of energy - a new baby, Engage growing, and then new realities started kicking in. I watched Engage’s runway drain as we struggled with reaching product market fit. We tried many ideas from the playbook - inbound sales, community, socials, and ads, but conversion growth was slow. The reasonable choice...

Features like avatars look trivial in products with user profiles, but most times, they are not. (Is anything actually trivial?). It’s even more interesting, as with Engage, when users can’t upload their profile pictures themselves. Where do we get one from? Gravatar! If you are familiar with this, this would be your answer as well. Gravatar is...

“Passkeys are a new, passwordless authentication method that offer a convenient authentication experience for sites and apps, using just a fingerprint, face scan or other screen lock.” (source). Don’t think too much about how it works, you can check out the demo at passkeys.io. I just tested it myself and couldn’t help but comment on the ease. I...