Meet Kelley Robinson: Under the Hood of Two-Factor Authentication
This post is part of a series introducing the speakers at the PyBay2018 conference in San Francisco this August. It’s a great chance to learn and connect with an engaged and diverse community of Python developers. We hope you’ll join us!
What are you going to be speaking about at PyBay 2018, and why are you excited to give this talk?
My talk is about two factor authentication: what it is, why it’s important, and how it works. So many websites involve some kind of user authentication and we keep learning that passwords aren’t enough to secure an account. The second factor has evolved a lot in the last few years away from SMS and I’m excited to share some of the technical details of how that all works and what we as web developers can do to make the experience better for our users.
How did you get into programming and Python?
I’ve been tinkering with Python since 2013, but at my last job I started doing a lot more infrastructure management. We had a bunch of Bash scripts for managing our operations — things like spinning up new EC2 instances on AWS or running Spark jobs on an EMR cluster. We wanted some more predictability and safety for those scripts, so I became very well acquainted with the Boto project and started rewriting them in Python. Now I love using Python for all of my Twilio applications because it’s so easy to spin up an application quickly.
What’s one of the features about Python you like the best?
This isn’t a language feature but I really appreciate the accessibility of Python to newcomers. From it coming pre-installed on Macs to the wealth of resources and tutorials on the internet, I think the community has done an excellent job of making the language a welcoming place.
What can you be found doing when you’re not writing code?
Cooking! I travel a lot so relish any opportunity I have when I’m home to make a big run to the farmers’ market and experiment with new recipes. I just got a fancy blender so I probably have a lot of soups and sorbets in my near future.
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