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OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (in plain English)

OktaDev
Talks
YouTube
7 HN users recommended this talk6 months2019–2026 score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN repeatedly points people to it as the clearest way to finally understand OAuth, to the point that one team made it required viewing for new hires.

Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.

“it was a requirement for new joiners to watch this in their first week” (HN, 2024)

3 strong recommendations · 4 recommendations · Talks · intro · partly dated

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@butisaidsudo Apr 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Why is OAuth still hard in 2023?
I read so many docs when I was trying to implement OAuth and got more and more confused. This video was a huge help though for explaining all of the concepts: [this video]
Clarified all OAuth concepts after confusing docs.
@willsmith72 Apr 2024 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Learn OAuth by building a client with Node.js
at my old company we worked with auth a lot, so it was a requirement for new joiners to watch this in their first week. i still recommend it if you want to learn oauth from 0 [this video]
Learn OAuth from zero.
@manigandham Oct 2019 Recommends
on HN thread An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect
Read more
Seems there's still confusion so I'll copy/paste my old comment: OAuth 1.0/2.0 are a set of protocols and standards allowing applications to identify users and get access to their data using existing profiles. OAuth is mostly focused around authorization with claims (which are just key-value pairs) and authentication was an afterthought. OpenID is another standard designed to let people authenticate across the web, launched with a lot of hype in the early web 2.0 days but never took off. OpenID Connect (OIDC) is a new standard based on OAuth 2 + OpenID to provide both authentication and authorization in a single flow. OIDC/OAuth is all based on tokens, which are JWTs containing a bunch of claims that can be validated against the server that issued them. There are ID tokens (for the user info) and Access tokens (for accessing an API on behalf of that user), but some services like social logins don't provide any access tokens. Other providers might have rate limits, or dont have fine-grained permissions, or you maybe you have completely internal APIs that you need tokens for. Also this video is a great in-depth walkthrough: [this video]
In-depth walkthrough of OAuth and OpenID Connect.
@krantic Nov 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Any comprehensive courses on Auth?
I have not seen a course that covers all of the things you are asking for. The best courses on the oidc/oauth and saml I have seen were the paid ones here: [link] On linkedinlearning this one was quite ok: [link] Free ressources check: - [link] -OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (in plain English): [this video] [link] -OAuth/OpenID by Nat Sakimura(chairman openid foundation) [link] For the active directory topic I don't know good ressources
Listed among free OAuth/OIDC learning resources.
@langur Nov 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Any comprehensive courses on Auth?
Read more
I found Nate Barbettini's video on OAuth and OpenID Connect incredibly insightful for understanding these topics. He explains everything so well- [this video] . Additionally, I'm part of the ZITADEL team, an open-source project that's free to download or use in our cloud offering. So, you can always tinker around with it as some others have already suggested. Our blog dives into various security topics, ranging from OAuth, OpenID Connect, and Single Sign-On, Authentication, Federation to emerging issues like Passkeys. We also discuss real-world Identity Management problems and solutions seen by ZITADEL users— [link] . For any specific security-related queries, feel free to join the conversation on our Discord chat: [link] . We're always discussing and sharing insights on these topics.
Insightful explanation of OAuth and OpenID Connect.
@scandox Feb 2026 Recommends
on HN thread What Is OAuth?
[this video] A classic explainer from almost a decade ago. This explains it from the point of view of the original problem it was designed to solve.
Explains OAuth from the original problem it solved.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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