
Show HN: Feather – A Lightweight Auth API - nick-garfield
https://feather.id
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nick-garfield
Nick here, one of the developers behind Feather.

When we set out to build an auth API, one of the first big challenges was just
wrapping our heads around all the various acronyms and protocols. Despite the
existence of standards like OAuth, OIDC, JWTs, SAML, etc., authentication is
anything but standard. As hobbyist devs, we wanted the interface to be simple.
RESTful. Leverage HTTP verbs. We wanted an auth API that we wouldn't have to
think about and would save us time.

After a lot of consideration, we settled on creating an abstraction for
/credentials. With this, we've been able to abstract away sign-in flows for
email+password and passwordless auth. "Just create a credential!" As Josh
Bloch once said, “Good names are the API talking back to you”. We're super
glad with how credentials abstract turned out. In the future, we plan to
extend it for supporting protocols like OAuth as well.

Feather has saved us a ton of time while building other projects these past
couple months, and we're happy to share it with everyone today :)

~~~
pliao39
That's such a great quote. Joshua Bloch's talk "How To Design A Good API and
Why it Matters"[1] is one of my favorite ever

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh4OeB9A-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh4OeB9A-c)

