Backend Banter

#038 - I Got Caught Rolling my Own Auth... feat. Dev Agrawal

Backend Banter

Show Notes

Lane chats with Dev Agrawal— content creator & Developer Advocate at Clerk! Tune in as they discuss DevRel, authentication vs. authorization, JWT, and so much more in this episode. Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm Dev's Twitter: https://twitter.com/devagrawal09 Dev's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@devagr

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:50) - Is Dev's name really Dev?

(02:10) - What is it about writing code that scares Dev?

(02:50) - JavaScript is one of the worst with dependencies

(03:09) - Dev's ideal world

(03:20) - .NET and Blazor

(03:59) - Blazor explained

(04:36) - WASM on the Front-end

(05:04) - Is Blazor unique to C# ?

(06:11) - What is a DevRel?

(08:07) - Lane's experience

(09:13) - You shouldn't roll your own Auth

(11:59) - Undifferentiated work

(13:56) - Authentication vs Authorization

(16:19) - Regarding Auth, which is a bigger pain point for companies

(16:48) - Pain points of Authorization

(18:38) - Pain Points of Authentication

(20:23) - Lane's perspective

(22:29) - Using a third party for authorization

(24:27) - Is Clerk used for both Authentication and Authorization?

(26:16) - JWT explained

(28:39) - Where is the users' data stored?

(29:27) - Features are developed as needed

(29:52) - Auth coupling to the rest of the system

(30:16) - Webhooks listeners to access user session data

(31:03) - Postgres foreign-data wrapper

(32:09) - Microservices sharing databases

(34:29) - CQRS

(37:37) - Average size of a company that uses Clerk

(40:50) - What are the most used ways to sign-in

(42:04) - Stances on passwords

(46:56) - OAuth

(50:33) - Why Lane dropped Sign-in with Twitter/X

(51:14) - What do popular services usually use?

(52:24) - Sign-in with Google

(57:39) - Unpopular opinion on Auth related web architecture

(01:00:17) - 2 ways of doing authentication

(01:05:59) - Where to find Dev

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