Startup Status Update – April 21, 2024
Today was one of those “we’re building the plane while flying it” days.
Woke up thinking about refresh token edge cases. Yeah—romantic, I know. One of our early users ran into a weird session-expiry + token-persistence combo that triggered a cascading failure in their app. Spent most of the morning tracing logs, reenacting the SSO flow on a test tenant, and muttering unintelligible curses at my terminal. Eventually figured it out: a misalignment between our internal session lifecycle logic and how a certain IdP handles clock skew. Silly, non-deterministic chaos. But now it’s patched with a cleanup routine and a more forgiving expiration buffer.
Also spent two hours updating our onboarding docs—again. Got great feedback from one of our more engaged alpha users: “I like that it’s powerful, but it’s kinda like assembling IKEA furniture without the pictures.” Fair.
So I restructured the getting-started guide, dropped in a sample script with actual auth flow output, and added a step-by-step for getting a test client running in five minutes or less. Time will tell, but I think this format will click better.
On a more existential note: Had a call with a potential integration partner. Infrastructure folks, really sharp. They have reach, but the integration complexity would be non-trivial, and I’m torn. Could do wonders for visibility. Could also nuke our roadmap timeline if we take it on too early. Still chewing on that one.
Internally, the fatigue is showing. My co-founder spent half the standup debugging an edge race condition in the session manager, then immediately jumped into answering user questions in support before even getting to coffee. We need async help—forum, better error codes, the whole thing.
But amidst the madness, there's a glimmer: our auth playground ("Integration Lab") is starting to take real shape. You can drop in your config, run flows, see output, no local setup. It's not public yet, but I tried it today for real. It felt… kind of magical.
Today’s How-To: Debugging Refresh Token Issues in OIDC
If you're seeing inconsistent refresh behavior across different IdPs, check for:
- Client clock drift (with ~5min leeway on the token expiry),
- Silent re-auth attempts that may be overwriting existing refresh tokens,
- Session store hygiene—some providers don't clean up old tokens automatically.
Here’s a quick pattern to help verify token freshness:
const now = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000);
if (token.expires_at - now < 60) {
refreshToken();
}
This will save you from asking users to re-login just to fetch another refresh token. Ask me how I know.
Mood today: 65% frustration, 35% pride. Which I’ve learned is basically a good day.
Back at it tomorrow.
