Clever Engineering Blog — Always a Student

Always a Student is one of Clever's culture tenets: we love to learn, and this blog is where we share what we learn on topics that matter to engineering, from small but critical technical details to how we organize our engineering teams. This blog is cross-published on Medium.

Privacy and Security in Clever Messaging

By Ulzii Otgonbaatar on

Designing and engineering a messaging system that is used by 6.8 million students and  half a million teachers in K-12 schools is no easy feat. While the typical threats  against online systems from unauthorized and unauthenticated access to sensitive information remain, the school environment compounds privacy challenges as additional entities such as guardians, co-teachers, and […]

How we handle multi-region sessions at Clever

By Nathan Leiby on

Why multi-region sessions? Each year leading up to Back to School (our busiest season), Clever’s engineering team invests in our highest traffic systems to make sure we can handle user growth and new traffic patterns. During 2020–2021, SAML auth at Clever grew from <10% of our login related traffic to about 40% of our traffic! For this […]

Evolving Systems for New Products

By Michael Gao on

When building systems for new products, there’s a delicate balance between writing code that works and writing code that lasts. A common anti-pattern is preemptively optimizing systems for the future while still trying to find product market fit. For new product teams, this can be a costly mistake as it leads to a slower iterative […]

How Clever grows inclusivity for women in engineering

By Stephanie Chen on

Five women on Clever’s engineering team discuss what inclusivity looks like at Clever, how to grow and maintain female leadership at a tech company, and the challenges they are excited to tackle within their roles. The engineering team is passionate about improving education and solving hard problems. One problem the Clever team is constantly solving […]

Using IAM Roles with Session Policies for Least Privilege

By Alex Smolen on

At Clever, we lock down code access to customer data using AWS IAM roles with session policies. In Clever’s microservice AWS architecture, each service has a unique IAM role with access to the AWS resources it needs: S3 buckets, DynamoDB tables, and so on. Our services are multi-tenant and customer data is separated via logical […]