Magic Links, Real Engineering: What I Learned Building Passwordless Auth From Scratch
There’s a kind of elegance that makes every engineer pause - a small idea that feels too clean to be true. For me, that idea was the magic link. One email, one click, no password. Frictionless authentication. No OAuth dependency. No password reset tickets. Just pure, minimal flow. And because I can’t resist a good experiment, I decided to build my own implementation from scratch - no frameworks, no auth libraries, just PHP, MySQL, and email delivery pipelines. ...