Justin Smestad

After maintaining an authentication library with 125 million downloads for over a decade, here’s what I learned about the real cost of auth: it’s not the build, it’s the maintenance nobody plans for. And no, an AI agent monitoring your dependencies isn’t the answer.

AI made code cheap. The bottleneck was never the code. It was scoping, estimation, and communication, the skills teams treated as optional for years. That bet no longer pays off.

Constants in Ruby code leads to poor object-oriented design principals. Use class methods instead to create a maintainable API without losing any performance.

Universal Links, App Links (aka Deep Links) are pretty complicated. Let me show you how to serve the server verification from your Phoenix app.

Expose your Elixir / Phoenix application to the internet using a free ngrok account. No more messing with dynamic hostnames.