The Faces Behind Open Source Projects: Pilcrow
We're back with our series of posts in which we interview open-source maintainers and showcase their amazing projects they keep pushing. This week we've talked with Pilcrow, an inspiring young dev from Japan, famous for his auth library Lucia and love for auth and security.
Lucia is one of the open-source tools that we use under-the-hood at Wasp. It grew to 9.5K stars on GitHub since October 2023. Unfortunately, this project is going to be deprecated in April 2025. Wasp will make all the necessary changes on time, no worries 😃 You should look into other projects Pilcrow has kickstarted as well, some of those will serve as a replacement for Lucia.
I’m Pilcrow. I’m a university student in Japan working on various open source projects around auth and security. I started programming like 4 years ago so I'm still new to the field. I love designing APIs a lot and that's probably the biggest reason I enjoy working on libraries.
I was asked to build several websites for school events and the part I struggled with the most was auth. Half of it was my inexperience, but I also found third-party offerings like Firebase to be unintuitive. Most of their features and APIs at the time were aimed at SPAs as well and didn't work well with server-rendered applications. The open source offerings weren't great either. To this day, I still don't really know how to actually use NextAuth (now Auth.js) or Passport.js.
