christiansmith
Joined 14 years ago
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220
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77
Member since
Aug 24
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Harvard Library Innovation Lab | Senior Software Engineer - Full Stack | Remote (some US states) or hybrid | Full-Time | https://lil.law.harvard.edu/
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is a software product studio and research lab embedded in the Harvard Law School Library, with a mission of bringing library principles to tech. We are currently working on projects including web archiving, remixable education resources, and AI as a new way of accessing knowledge. As a member of our engineering team, the Senior Software Engineer will work across our various tools, applications, and experiments. The ideal candidate will have experience building performant, testable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant products and tools at scale, for audiences both technical and non-technical.
You can apply here: https://lil.law.harvard.edu/jobs/#sse-fs. Please include a short cover letter explaining how your career trajectory and interests align with our work and mission.
Harvard eligibility is weird: we can hire hybrid near Cambridge, MA, or remote only if you live in the states of CA, CT, GA, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VA, VT and WA.
Comment · 10 years ago
Lack of physical escape key with vi is not a problem for me. An old trick is to remap caps lock (never used) to Ctrl (constantly used), which is easier to reach from "asdfhjkl" hand positioning. Then Ctrl-C is mapped to escape, and I never have to reach up to the fn row from the home row. Makes working with vi a bit more seamless and this lack of fn row is a moot point. So maybe we have to change few key bindings for ancient but still useful software. Really not a deal killer.
Comment · 10 years ago
Location: Oregon/South Dakota
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No; willing to travel
Technologies: OpenID Connect, JWT, OAuth, SSO, LDAP, SAML, FIDO, RBAC, ABAC
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmsmith | https://github.com/christiansmith | https://github.com/anvilresearch
Email: [email protected]
We've been working on identity and access management infrastructure software for a few years now. We're committed to keeping our projects free and open source (MIT), and we've been fortunate to sustain the effort by working for users that need specific features implemented or help with integration. Our primary project is an authorization server called Anvil Connect:
https://github.com/anvilresearch/connect
There's an explosion of change happening in this field right now, both from within and from new frontiers like IoT and blockchain. We have plans for things we'd like to build, and we're looking for forward thinking users that need them built.
Comment · 10 years ago
Little late to the party but have you considered using something like an authorization server?
We created Anvil Connect (based on OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect) to solve a bundle of auth-related problems all at once. It's a separate server instead of a library, because once you need to share user accounts between several apps (think different platforms) the complexity increases dramatically. There are (third party) client libraries available for a number of languages.
Comment · 11 years ago
We might be a good fit. At Anvil Research we need help with documentation, blog posts, tutorials, and user guides for Anvil Connect. It's an open source identity hub built with Node:
https://github.com/anvilresearch/connect
I'd love to speak with you. Please contact me (see profile).
Comment · 12 years ago
In fact, unlike previous OpenID protocols, OpenID Connect is a profile of OAuth 2.0.
The conflation of authorization with authentication is an accident and a mistake. They are still quite separate concepts. Authentication is about verifying identity. Authorization is about privileges afforded a given identity. Access control models usually depend on some form of upstream authentication.
The third-party authorization flows provided by OAuth are not intended to establish or verify a user's identity. Their purpose is to extend a user's access to a third-party in a limited way without sharing passwords.
Social Sign-in is an accident of 3-Legged OAuth and its use for this purpose is considered a very weak form of authentication.
OpenID Connect takes the best ideas from preceding identity protocols and incorporates them into OAuth flows, giving the best of both worlds.
More information on all of the above here: https://github.com/christiansmith/anvil-connect/wiki/Referen...
Comment · 12 years ago
Understood, and I'm glad to live and let live in general, but this one is too close in subject matter to my own work and may eventually lead to confusion about who's doing what. That seems like a reasonable cause for concern.
Comment · 12 years ago
This is an interesting looking project, but I have to say I'm not crazy about the author's use of the name Anvil. I've owned the domain anvil.io going back several years, I've been actively using variations on the name Anvil for security related software that's in production for a period of time as well. If the authors of the project read this, please consider renaming it.
Comment · 12 years ago
> Why should we own cars?
In the city, I couldn't possibly agree with this more. When I lived in Boston I sold my car after the first two years because it was a ridiculous expense and hassle for the utility. Taking a cab a few times a week turned out to be cheaper than parking tickets alone.
Given a choice though, I much prefer to live in less densely populated areas (e.g., northwest Montana), and owning a vehicle is really unavoidable. In these places that also means a 4x4 SUV or truck, not a Prius, or else you'd be calling a tow truck every 5 minutes in the winter.
Comment · 12 years ago
This Google Hangout starts in about 30 minutes:
"ICE Code Editor is the JavaScript 3D visualization programming environment used throughout the book 3D Game Programming for Kids. It's written with Dart, the language for scalable web app engineering from Google. In this hangout, prolific blogger, author, and coder Chris Strom takes us on a deep dive into the ICE source code."
Watch it live, join the hangout, or check it out later on Youtube.
Comment · 12 years ago
Working on an IDaaS platform partly based on this open source work:
https://github.com/christiansmith/anvil-connect
Anyone interested in trying this out or collaborating, please get in touch using the email in my profile!
Comment · 12 years ago
This may not be any indication. A Firebase competitor named GoInstant was bought by Salesforce, used to build a few things internally at that company, and very recently shut down and the team integrated into the parent company. Any outsiders that built anything with GoInstant were basically out of luck. I have no idea how many users they had, and Firebase has greater visible traction, so that may factor in as well.
Comment · 12 years ago
I didn't take it personally at all and if you have the time and inclination I'd love to hear more about your experiences. Please feel free to email me. smith at anvil dot io.
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is a software product studio and research lab embedded in the Harvard Law School Library, with a mission of bringing library principles to tech. We are currently working on projects including web archiving, remixable education resources, and AI as a new way of accessing knowledge. As a member of our engineering team, the Senior Software Engineer will work across our various tools, applications, and experiments. The ideal candidate will have experience building performant, testable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant products and tools at scale, for audiences both technical and non-technical.
You can apply here: https://lil.law.harvard.edu/jobs/#sse-fs. Please include a short cover letter explaining how your career trajectory and interests align with our work and mission.
Harvard eligibility is weird: we can hire hybrid near Cambridge, MA, or remote only if you live in the states of CA, CT, GA, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VA, VT and WA.