It’s been just over five weeks since the launch of ChatGPT (it happened on November 30, 2022). Since then, from casual conversations over the holidays to New York Times think pieces, people have been asking if ChatGPT could do their jobs.
In case you’re wondering, I’m a Senior Developer Advocate at Okta for the Auth0 product. If that sounds confusing, it’s because Okta acquired Auth0 in May 2021, and while we’re one company, that company has two products named “Okta” and “Auth0”. It’s my job to show mobile developers how they can use the Auth0 product to authenticate and authorize users.
In the video above, I “had a conversation” with ChatGPT where I asked it some basic questions about OAuth2, OIDC, and Auth0, and it answered them correctly. However, when it got to questions about writing iOS and Android apps that used Auth0 for login, it got some details wrong — and in programming, it’s the details that get you. Watch the video to find out what happened!
Yours Truly, at the Okta office in London, June 2022. Tap to view at full size.
So this arrived in my work email earlier today:
I’m enjoying my work on the Developer Engagement (DevN) team at what we’re currently calling “Auth0 by Okta” — that’s the developer-centric customer-facing authentication/authorization system by Okta, or what I often shorten to the layperson-friendly catchphrase “login as a service.”
I greatly enjoy working with the DevN team, who are that wonderful combination of smart and nice:
First team dinner of our London summit, June 2022. Tap to view at full size.
I’m also honored to be the team’s Chaos Muppet — as evidenced by this Facet5 personality profile report of the various team members and how we rate on “control:”
Thanks to Okta, Auth0, and the DevN team for two wonderful years! Let’s see what Year Three looks like.
C’mon, how many programming tutorial videos have a scene like this?
If you’re making an iOS app, the odds are pretty good that sooner or later, you’re going to have to integrate authentication — login and logout — into it. I show you how to do that with Auth0 in both a video…
…as well as a matching two-part article series that walks you through the process:
Come drop by the booth — we should be pretty easy to find. Just listen for the accordion.
My history with Python
Toronto programmer D’Arcy Cain was looking for a programmer to help him develop an ecommerce site for a client. At the time, the stack that web developers needed to know was LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl (later expanded to include other languages whose names start with “P”). D’Arcy’s preferred stack was BSD, Apache, Postgres, and Python, which at the time was considered to be a contrarian choice.
He asked if I was willing to learn Python, and I said “Sure! I can pick it up after I get back from Burning Man, on the first day after Labor Day…”
He said “No — I need you to hit the ground running on the first day after Labor Day.”
The edition of Learning Python I used — the first edition!
And I said, “All right. I’ll make it happen.” So I packed my laptop and a copy of O’Reilly’s Learning Python and took it with me to Black Rock Desert.
Those were wild times and even wilder hair, man.
Since Burning Man is more of party-all-night place, it can be quite peaceful in the morning. The rental RV that I shared with San Francisco-based artist David Newman and our friend Nancy was an oasis of calm with a good generator, and I was able to spend a couple of hours a day going through Python exercises, catch a nap, and then strike out onto the playa in the afternoon for the next evening’s mayhem.
By the time I got back to Toronto, I was ready to start coding in Python, and a descendant of that original site and its business still exists today. I figured that any programming language you can learn at Burning Man has to be good, so I’ve been using it to get things done since then, including putting together the Tampa Bay tech events list that appears on this blog weekly.
In spite of my long-time use of Python, even during that period when Ruby was ascendant thanks to Rails, I’ve never gone to PyCon — until now. I’m looking forward to it!
The article demonstrates the most basic use of the Auth0.swift SDK, the Auth0 SDK for all Apple platforms — not just iOS, but macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It’s Auth0’s third most-used SDKs, accounting for more than one in ten API requests to Auth0 systems!
It’s a two-part tutorial. Part 1 of the tutorial starts with File → New Project…, adds some basic interactivity, adds the Auth0.swift package, walks you through setup on the Auth0 side, and finally enables login and logout:
The app’s “logged out” screen.
Auth0’s Universal Login.
The app’s “logged in” screen.
Part 2 of the tutorial takes your basic login/logout app and gives it the ability to read user information from the user profile and display it onscreen:
Avocado Labs an Auth0 project whose goal is to keep developers and techies — and people who want to become developers and techies — connected through high-quality online talks.
Today at noon Eastern (17:00 UTC), join Avocado Labs’ Twitch channel to meet Matthew Pegula, Director of Creative Technology at the technology/experience design studio Deeplocal.
He’ll be talking about some of their cool projects, including a project called “Connected Mistletoe”, which keeps distant people connected over the holidays:
Here’s the brief for the talk:
Matthew Pegula works at Deeplocal, a creative technology and experience design studio based in Pittsburgh, PA. They’re a group of engineers and creatives who use technology to tell stories and create experiences in novel ways. At first glance, their projects don’t always jump out as being overly technical or software-driven, but that’s sort of the idea: the technology enables the story, it doesn’t overshadow it. Matthew is going to show a few of their favorite projects, talk about the technology that’s driving them, and some of the challenges they ran into along the way.
Matthew Pegula is a software engineer who has been lucky enough to blend his interests in technology, design, writing, and engineering into a career that encompasses them all. He has a BS in computer science from Allegheny College and leads the Creative Technology team at Deeplocal.
![iOS Simulator screen shot: Screen with title “Logged in”, photo of user, user]s name and email address, and “Log out” button.](https://www.globalnerdy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/logged-in-2.jpg)
Avocado Labs