July 2022 Summaries

THAT Conference is a developer-focused conference taking place in Wisconsin this week, sponsored by FusionAuth. The conference covers a broad range of technical topics including the MERN stack, OpenTelemetry, IoT, career development, data, .NET, and NoSQL. It's aimed at inclusivity and takes place in a beautiful location in the Midwest. The FusionAuth team will be attending to connect with developers, learn about their experiences, and showcase their auth built by devs, for devs product. They'll have a booth in the sponsor hallway, and team members will give presentations on topics such as protecting APIs using OAuth. The conference also features a hallway track for in-person connections and conversations.

While esports competitions are high skill cap events, both hobby gamers and elite professionals alike expect optimal network conditions when they play games. A suboptimal network can turn an enjoyable event into an infuriating one that drives players away. With tens of thousands of games released annually, it’s crucial to keep your players happy by making the right technical decisions, especially in professional tournaments where millions of dollars are on the line. Choosing between self-hosting critical infrastructure or using third-party infrastructure-as-a-service or software-as-a-service providers directly affects latency and playability for end users. Critical infrastructure includes servers that process game logic, authentication servers, and more, which must be hosted to ensure availability, scalability, and disaster recovery. Network latency is a key factor in ensuring good gameplay, particularly in competitive games like multiplayer shooters and RTS games where milliseconds can make the difference between winning and losing. The impact of network latency was highlighted by issues with Rocket League and Apex Legends, leading players to suffer errors such as disconnections and lag spikes that cost them games or even entire tournaments.

FusionAuth is being used by ClearSpend, a free spend-control and expense-management solution for small businesses, as their identity provider. Stephen Saucier, Head of UX Development at ClearSpend, has found FusionAuth to be easy to use, well-documented, cost-effective, and scalable. He praises its APIs, ease of self-hosting instances, and portability. FusionAuth has saved ClearSpend thousands of dollars per year in costs. The company uses FusionAuth's user management features, OAuth, MFA via Twilio SMS, and custom-built UI on top of the APIs. They run FusionAuth in a Kubernetes cluster with their main applications. Stephen notes that while FusionAuth is well-suited for their needs, there are areas for improvement, including outdated documentation and limited customization options for user interfaces.