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blog Clever Engineering Blog — Always a Student Clever Home Always a Student is one of Clever’s culture tenets: we love to learn, and this blog is where we share what we learn on topics that matter to engineering, from small but critical technical details to how we organize our engineering teams. This blog is cross-published on Medium . authentication authorization SAML Protocol By Keith Richards on November 29, 2023 A tool for Identity Federation Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML, is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between two parties. It’s a common strategy for single sign-on (SSO), allowing users to sign in once and authenticate with multiple third party applications. Similar to OAuth2.0, SAML promotes data security by preventing direct […] Read More auth authentication OpenID Connect By Keith Richards on July 18, 2023 Adding AuthN to OAuth2.0 OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an authentication protocol that sits on top of the OAuth2.0 protocol. It provides a standardized way for clients to authenticate users and obtain information about their identity. In simple terms, OpenID Connect allows users to log in to different applications using a single set of credentials. It […] Read More auth authentication What is OAuth? By Keith Richards on May 23, 2023 A primer on delegated access OAuth, short for open authorization”, is a widely used protocol that allows users to grant third-party websites or applications access to their personal information on other websites. It provides a mechanism for secure access delegation across the internet. History Class Prior to the creation of OAuth, sharing of information with […] Read More auth authentication authorization AuthN vs AuthZ: What is Auth? By Keith Richards on March 22, 2023 Demystifying authentication and authorization When you hear the term Auth, what comes to mind? You probably think of signing into a system with your username and password, and you’re half right. But auth is bigger than that. The bucket term also includes everything you can do in a system once you submit those credentials. Auth […] Read More privacy security Privacy and Security in Clever Messaging By Ulzii Otgonbaatar on October 11, 2022 Designing and engineering a messaging system that is used by 6.8 million students and half a million teachers in K-12 schools is no easy feat. While the typical threats against online systems from unauthorized and unauthenticated access to sensitive information remain, the school environment compounds privacy challenges as additional entities such as guardians, co-teachers, and […] Read More interviewing onboarding Interviewing at Clever: Answers to the 10 most common questions By Casey Schlotter on September 23, 2022 What’s it like to be an engineer at Clever? What does success look like for individuals and teams? From engineers with non-traditional backgrounds to engineers with Computer Science degrees, four engineers share their perspectives about their experiences, typical days, and growth while working at Clever. Read More internship interviewing onboarding Working at Clever: a perspective from a former intern turned full time engineer By Vijay Bharadwaj on April 25, 2022 During my final search for an internship, I had an idea of where I wanted to work: a place with a friendly culture and strong engineering practices – something in between a startup and a big company. To my luck, I interned at Clever – an organization that surpassed those expectations in the span of […] Read More devops resiliency How we handle multi-region sessions at Clever By Nathan Leiby on August 10, 2021 Why multi-region sessions? Each year leading up to Back to School (our busiest season), Clever’s engineering team invests in our highest traffic systems to make sure we can handle user growth and new traffic patterns. During 2020–2021, SAML auth at Clever grew from 10% of our login related traffic to about 40% of our traffic! For this […] Read More general Lessons learned: My first year transitioning from an engineer to a manager By Emily Hou on July 12, 2021 Emily Hou talks about her transition from an individual contributor to an engineering manager at Clever. Read More security How Clever Secures Infrastructure Secrets Using AWS SSM Parameter Store By Ulzii Otgonbaatar on June 9, 2021 Context At Clever, we rely on nearly two thousand infrastructure secrets like DB access keys, API tokens, and session secret keys to provide our services to students and teachers. Properly securing these secrets so we don’t expose them in our various environments requires thorough engineering efforts. In fact, securing secrets is generally a hard problem […] Read More 1 2 … 4 ▸ About Contact Jobs Newsroom Terms of Service Privacy Policy Help Center © 2015...