Top Secret #15: RBAC, Bombing Volcanoes, and Ivar the Boneless Viking
This week, we cover a few major product improvements, historic milestones in biotechnology, the serendipitous discovery of an original Magna Carta, and a marauding 9th century Viking!
Lots of exciting changes landed this week for Tesseral. I’ll highlight three here.
First, we added support for Login with Github! It’s a little improvement, but
if you sell products that developers use, you know this is important. You can learn more here. We’re aiming to have another big update for the devtools/infra crowd next week. Stay tuned.
We also shipped a comprehensive redesign of the Tesseral Console. We reorganized and restyled an awful lot of components. Weeks ago, we shipped a version of the console that needed improvement. Things should look a little more polished now.
But there’s always room for more design work. We’ll continue to improve how Tesseral looks and feels; but more importantly, we’ll continue to make things more intuitive.
The biggest feature launched last week was role-based access control (RBAC).
Business software generally has multiple users from the same company working together. Not all users can do the same things. That is, people have different roles.
I like to use expense management software as an example here.
Just about anyone who works at a company might incur a business expense — you might buy a stapler for the office or take a client out to dinner. So everyone who uses expense management software needs the ability to submit expenses for reimbursement.
But not everyone should have the ability to approve an expense. That power should probably belong to people in the Finance department. They have to make sure that expenses adhere to company policy and that they’re linked to the right journal entries (and probably some other stuff that I don’t appreciate!)
RBAC is essentially just a conceptual framework for mapping people onto different things they can do in business software. Tesseral makes it really easy for developers to implement RBAC.
If you’re interested in the technical docs, you can check them out here.
What We’re Reading
World’s first personalized CRISPR therapy given to baby with genetic disease. If you know me well, you know I have long maintained a hobbyist’s interest in biotechnology. I really wish this milestone caught more widespread attention, because it’s truly a breathtaking miracle of modern science. The child received a treatment uniquely designed to treat his rare genetic condition by editing his genes. And, by all indications, it worked almost immediately.
Harvard Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original. Harvard has had this Magna Carta since the mid- 20th century, not thinking much of it. Everyone assumed it was a copy. A British academic stumbled across an image of the document by accident while skimming Harvard’s digital archives, immediately recognizing it as an original. This makes me wonder how much historical and archeological discovery will take place over the coming years. An immense volume of data has been digitized, but it’s still relatively hard to parse; advances in AI applications designed for business will surely spill over into academia. We might not have to rely on chance as much. I’m excited to see what happens.
Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences. This is really a beautiful portrait of discovery. From the article, on the inspiration for a groundbreaking inquiry in physics: “People have studied splashing for 100 years, and nobody had thought to take the air out. It’s a stupid experiment!” I’m reminded that there’s an awful lot left out there to discover. What else is like this — where else has no one thought to take the air out?
That Time We Bombed a Volcano. In 1935, a squadron of bombers flew out of Pearl Harbor and dropped 12,000 pounds of explosives on Mauna Loa in hopes that they could stop it from erupting. They figured it was worth a try. And the volcano did eventually stop erupting. Geologists don’t think the bombs really did anything. People were still finding bombs there as of a few years ago.
The Everyday Dramas of Manhattan Rush Hour. These are some really beautiful photographs of a banal evening commute in New York City in 1998. The photographer, basically disappointed at the photos’ lack of anything remarkable, stashed them away for about 25 years. And of course, these are captivating photos all these years later. An aside — I’ve always wanted to be able to write as well as the pieces in the New Yorker.
Nerd CornerTM
There’s a legendary Viking leader known for leading the Great Heathen Army in conquest of England. He has made his way into history as Ivar the Boneless — a truly amazing nickname.
No one really knows why he was called Ivar the Boneless. At least, no one knows for sure. Some speculation has suggested that he might have had some heritable disease, that he very literally suffered from a condition that afflicted his bones. Other speculation has wondered if Ivar was impotent.
There’s a credible explanation that’s a lot more boring, though.
There’s a Latin word exosus that means something like thoroughly loathsome or completely abhorrent. It’s very possible if you have only a little experience with Latin to mistake exosus for something of the construction ex + os (loosely speaking, out of + bone).
Some scholars therefore think Ivar the Boneless is therefore just a mistranslation, and that the epithet should be something more like Ivar the Horrible.
Other Cool Stuff
corp.band: this is a cool website done in a Windows 95 style. It was up on Hacker News the other day. I recommend that you open up your browser’s dev tools and take a look at the console.
wtfnode: this seems like it might actually be useful for debugging (?), but it’s mostly just funny. The README kind of just oozes frustration: “I'm usually all about the tests, really, but this module relies so fully on things that it shouldn't that it's kind of not worth it.”
cowsay: why does this have 22,000 weekly downloads?