Open Apps with Pocket ID

I've decided to take some time off of work recently, and thought it would be fun to put a spin on "how to" blog posts. In addition to writing about a particular topic, I thought it could be cool to actually deploy it somewhere and allow it to be publicly used. I've had this idea before, but I'd still like to have user authentication that I can streamline across various applications at different subdomains. There are plenty of auth solutions out there, but I recently came across one that is simple to deploy called Pocket ID, which exclusively uses passkeys.

Pocket ID is open source and can be self-hosted. Passkeys are a modern, passwordless authentication method that replaces passwords with cryptographic key pairs (public/private) stored on your device — easy and secure auth, with no managing people's passwords!

I was also recently re-reading Hands on Scala (which is now free online and updated for Scala 3), and was inspired to use more of the libraries in The lihaoyi Scala Platform 🇸🇬. In my spare time, I had been working on a zero-dependency Scala framework called branch. It was a more educational endeavor, and I thought about porting out the more interesting components, and replacing modules with existing, more battle-tested libraries from this ecosystem. I know... I know... what will Scala do with one less JSON library? 😁 It's probably for the best. I've broken most of those out to their own libraries. They're still "hobby" projects, but you could learn more about them here:

• lzy - Somewhere between lazy Futures, and a tiny Effect System for Scala
• spider - A server-side reactive UI library for Scala 3, inspired by Phoenix LiveView
• keanu - A typed EventBus implementation and a local ActorSystem for message-based concurrency patterns
• mustachio - A Mustache template engine implementation in Scala
• hollywood - A library for building LLM agents in Scala 3
• piggy - A Scala library for working with SQL via java.sql

I have deployed an instance of Pocket ID, and made a small, reusable library with some auth helpers called hookshot. Hopefully soon, I will write a post about the authentication flow, and then about the first app I'm planning - a short link server.