Announcing AuthCon
Hiya,
This newsletter is all about customer identity and access management (CIAM). I've always learned by writing, and this newsletter is no different. I've covered all kinds of topics, from diving into RFCs to examining user provisioning in the CIAM context to interviews with outside experts.
However, newsletters and blog posts are, of course, not the only way to learn about the intricacies of CIAM.
A Conference for CIAM
I wanted to share that the first conference dedicated to sharing CIAM knowledge is happening in New York in May of 2025. Full disclosure, this is being put on by my employer and I suggested some of the speakers.
I'm excited about this because I think customer identity is one of many cross-cutting concerns that all engineers need to handle. Similar to observability, ETL, and data storage, the complexities of customer identity afflict nearly every application. Shining a light on these benefits the entire software industry.
If everyone has to solve this problem, let’s talk about great ways to solve it!
I've been deep in CIAM for four years and am still learning about the technical, organizational and implementation complexities of this critical application component.
While all the speakers haven't been selected, I look forward to learning more about CIAM concepts, real-world use cases, and standards.
Other Conferences
Now, there are lot of great conferences where you can meet and discuss identity in person. Some that I've either been to or heard good things about include:
Identiverse, which I had the honor of speaking at a few years ago
Authenticate, from the FIDO folks
Here's a wiki page with a more complete list as well.
But there's nothing solely focused on the customer identity and access management problem space, especially for developers. AuthCon fills that void.
You can learn more about the conference, register for tickets, or submit to the CFP by reading the announcement blog post or visiting AuthCon.io.
Cheers,
Dan