Woke up at 7:45 AM with coffee and a question: Are we still building the thing we set out to build? Answer: mostly yes. Spent 30 minutes reviewing our roadmap. We’re tracking toward mid-May's internal milestone, with one small detour: SAML is… complicated. More on that later.
By 8:15 AM I was knee-deep in our dashboard. Noticed a spike in failed logins—JWT expirations acting up. Dragged in the dev team, and we found a small loop hole in the Firebase + AWS Cognito token refresh flow. We're reconsidering where exactly session authority should live. Right now, it's a bit of a nomad. Solution? A background service worker to own session state. Might be the cleverest fix we’ve stumbled across in a week.
Support tickets are starting to show patterns. Mobile wrappers + redirect flows = confusion. UI tweaks + doc clarification incoming.
Big legal chat at 10:30 AM. Apparently, adding SAML means adding a whole new level of liability. Enterprise needs it, but it's no longer just wiring up an SSO lib and calling it a day. We're punting SAML to post-MVP and sticking with OIDC for now. Unfortunate, but responsible.
Lunch was a casual call with a Series B infra founder. Takeaway: build an interactive “Integration Lab” as a demo playground. Let users toggle Firebase, Auth0, Supabase, etc., without writing code. It’s demo candy. Might backlog it for after preview release.
Early afternoon = documentation rewrite marathon. Focused on provider interface patterns—i.e., how to plug in any identity provider like it's a Lego block. Lots of small examples. Writing good docs is like writing good code, except it’s harder and nobody claps when you format JSON.
Frontend planning at 2:30 PM. We're leaning into PWA capabilities. Goal: better pre-auth behavior when offline. Might turn into an unexpected differentiator for devs building in flaky networks. Syncing post-login might just feel… magical.
At 3 PM, switched gears to write copy for our early-access developer announcement. Messaging is coming together: simple auth layering, decoupled provider logic, no lock-in. Also added a call for alpha tester volunteers—hopefully a few curious devs roll in.
Post-walk energy refresh: CRM updates, lead reviews. Some enterprise leads have gone radio silent. Following up later this week with value-driven nudges. On the plus side: new inbound came from our GitHub discussions tab. That’s the kind of signal I like.
Wrapped the day reviewing UI component inconsistencies with our design contractor. Some auth screens break layout across devices. We're cleaning that up, keeping future white-labeling in mind.
Core team check-in at 6:30 PM. Spirits high. OAuth testing is still flaky between providers, so we’re spinning up a community modules thread. Might be a decent on-ramp for open-source contributors.
Evening wind-down with a podcast from Clerk’s CTO. Lots of alignment: build for DX, not just for tools. Key reminder—we’re the auth layer, not another auth provider.
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“We're not sprinting blindly, but we are moving decisively.”
That felt true today. Fewer unknowns, better structure, higher confidence. Not perfect, but we’re still building the right thing.
