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.

Open Sourcing our Policies

By Mohit Gupta on

Student Data privacy and security are our foremost responsibilities here at Clever. We invest heavily to ensure that we are improving privacy for schools, students, and teachers, and we make sure that everyone at Clever is constantly working towards this goal. About five months ago, we were made aware of aspects of our privacy policy […]

Clever Shellshock Recommendations

By wpengine on

CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169, also known as “Shellshock”, are high impact vulnerabilities affecting the Born Again Shell (BASH). The vulnerability allows an attacker to trick Bash into running arbitrary commands which could result in unauthorized disclosure of information, unauthorized modification and disruption of service. Because this is such a big threat, and because at Clever we take security […]

Testing Private Functions in JavaScript Modules

By clevereng on

As JavaScript has matured as a language, the module has become the primary unit of code organization. However, as with many facets of JS, modules grew organically from the developer ecosystem (as opposed to being designed as part of the language from the beginning), so they have their flaws – one being that you can […]

The Best Tool for the Join: Scaling Node.js with Unix

By clevereng on

At Clever we help 1 in 6 schools in the country sync data on an hourly basis from their student information systems (SISes) to the ed tech apps that their teachers and students use. These 20,000 schools sync about 50 GB of data in aggregate – that’s over a terabyte of data per day. While […]

Engineering at Clever

By Rafael Garcia on

At Clever we’re building a way for students and teachers to start using learning applications with a click of a button. This is incredibly difficult to do in a school environment, because existing infrastructure is typically incompatible with a world where students use software on the internet. The backbone of the infrastructure at most schools […]