Jake Hawkes, Staff Engineer at Sibi
Oso Bear of the Month is a series of interviews with developers in our community to connect and learn more about their authorization journey. We sat down with Jake Hawkes, Staff Engineer at Sibi.
What is your authorization story? Share a bit on how you used Oso to solve for it.
We used Oso Cloud to replace our former authorization solution and it has been a night-and-day difference. We can now easily reason about our authorization schema, confidently enhance it to meet our evolving needs, and quickly discover why it’s working the way it is. A handful of times we’ve had more difficult questions about our implementation, and the Oso team has great ideas to help solve them.
What is one recommendation you would offer to someone doing authorization for the first time?
Write lots of tests! And use Oso Cloud - the way our authorization is somewhat “decoupled” from our main application code makes it much more straightforward to reason about.
Since using Oso, what's a new thing you have been able to accomplish?
Get extremely straightforward answers to questions like, “why is this user allowed/forbidden to do this action?” - and also adding new permissions is a piece of cake now.
How do you think you have most benefited by using Oso?
Being able to open our 4 Polar files and grok exactly how ALL of our authorization works in one place - and the Polar tests that allow us to feel extremely confident when we make changes.
Anything additional you want to share about Oso, authorization, your experience?
Give me your heart, make it real, or else forget about it
If you had a magic wand, what is one thing you would add or change in Oso?
I think I’d be equally happy with the ability to specify default values for attributes, or a has_no_relations(…) rule
I’m also really excited for the caching functionality coming to Oso Cloud.
Thank you so much!
If you enjoyed this interview we encourage you to share it, tag @osohq. We'd also love to hear from you on how your authorization journey is going, join us and thousands of developers on slack!
