3 posts tagged with "Lit"

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

With great power (to choose your own tools) comes great responsibility. Not inheriting a legacy toolchain is an infrastructure engineer’s dream, but it can be hard to know where to start.

As the first infrastructure engineer hired to work on authentik, I saw the greenfield opportunities, but also the responsibility and long-term importance of choosing the best stack of tools and build processes. From my past roles, I already knew many of the considerations we would need to factor in.

For example, we know that ease of maintenance is a primary consideration, as is the stability and probable longevity of the tool, how well the tools integrate, and of course the level of support we were likely to get for each tool.

In this post we share some of what we are using to build authentik, and the lessons behind those choices.

Lit comes with its own library to help your app support multiple written languages. Lit's localization feature updates the page automatically when a language is switched during a browser session, but the documentation does not describe how you can switch languages.

Let's dive into how you might do that.

Back in 2018, I made a fateful decision: I chose to rebuild authentik using Lit and not React.

We like to think that technical decisions are primarily, well, technical, but some of the biggest consequences of these decisions come from how a technology is adopted and used – not the technology itself.

So it was with React.

In this post, I’ll explain why I made this decision, how it did and didn’t pay off, and why, ultimately, I don’t regret it. The point isn’t to sway you toward or away from React or to make an argument about web frameworks in general, but to encourage a discussion about the choices early-stage startups have to make.