Top Secret #18: New Website, New SDKs, (Almost) Extinct Possums, and Medieval Moats
This week, we talk about our website glow-up, audit logs on deck, and the good, bad, and the ugly of each U.S. state's DMV (or equivalent) login page. Which we looked at. We looked at them all.
Man, it’s been a whirlwind since we launched Tesseral.
A few things in the last week:
We redesigned our website. This is all manual Javascript and CSS. I’m excited.
We now officially support Next.js with our new SDK.
We’ve reorganized our simple email + password flow. We made a product design decision in Tesseral’s earliest days (i.e., late December or early January) that incurred some technical debt, and I’m glad we can ship a refined product experience.
Small but significant frontend bug fixes like this one that thoughtful users found for us.
Coming very soon:
We’ll be shipping our first Rust SDK for Axum – with more to follow shortly
We’ll be shipping our Audit Logs feature
Things people have asked for in the last week or so, all of which are now on roadmap:
Reintroduction of the self-service SAML wizard experience from SSOReady
Support for OpenID Connect logins with enterprise IDPs
Support for Login with Facebook (didn’t see this one coming so soon!)
Simplification of our self-hosting experience (we knew this was coming)
We have also had some early customers pushing us for highly complex product features that we didn’t anticipate building so soon. There’s a lot of design work to be done before we can share more :)
From the Blog:
What a developer needs to know about SCIM: a relatively serious, mildly technical explainer of SCIM provisioning. If you make enterprise software and don’t know much about SCIM provisioning, I’d suggest giving this a quick skim. (Get it?) This was pretty popular on Hacker News last week.
The Nevada, Indiana, and Florida DMVs have unusually bad login pages: this one’s a bit sillier. A while back, I combed through every state’s DMV login page (if any existed). I tried to find the worst ones. It wasn’t super hard. For some reason, the Florida DMV built its auth system on Salesforce and didn’t even try to hide it.
What We’re Reading
A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation: this is a very interesting preview of where wearables could be going…
Connecticut legislature passes bill overhauling century-old towing laws: credit to ProPublica for its sustained investment in local investigative journalism. This is a great portrait of sensible legislation inching along to pretty minimal fanfare.
A tiny endangered creature that ‘moves like greased lightning’ has been found in an unexpected place: researchers found a variety of tiny Australian possum that everyone had assumed to be extinct – not unlike the coelacanth many years ago. You should click on this to see the cute photos.
Message from Brian: organizational changes to accelerate back to Starbucks: I am fascinated by the turnaround efforts at Starbucks. Things have been going in the wrong direction for a while, and I don’t think many people realize that the company needs to change. New(ish) CEO Brian Niccol has jettisoned a few more executives in an effort to make change happen faster.
The Wyoming hospital upending the logic of private equity: while I object to a few odd ideas here, especially a strange, logically unsound appeal to morality (e.g., “Accepting that private equity is the only option for rural hospitals, though, requires accepting that rural Americans deserve less access to care…”), I’m always happy to dunk on PE. Having seen behind the curtain on a few PE deals, I’m not convinced the asset class allocates much smart money. Glad to see a bit of contest to the healthcare PE playbook.
The radical development of an entirely new painkiller: this is an exceptionally written, wandering profile of researchers’ efforts to develop suzetrigine, a novel pain medication that is considered equally effective as prescription opioids but without sedative effects or risk of addition.
Nerd CornerTM
I am really annoyed by certain people’s fixation with moats in startups. Out of annoyance and an affinity for post-irony nonsense, I felt compelled this week to learn all about actual moats – like the kind you use to defend castles.
Here are my five favorite elements of pre-modern defensive fortification:
The flèche
The faussebraye
The shōjibori (grid-style dry moat) as at Yamanaka Castle
The square bergfried
Other Cool Stuff
These are two interesting links. Click on them.
From The Archives
(1999) MBAs get .com fever
(1999) A brief history of hackerdom
(2001) Ballmer: Linux is a cancer
(2015) Investors and analysts are losing their minds over Amazon’s AWS numbers
Thanks,
Ned