2024.08.01
📰 News & Discussions
LoFi/17 Community Meetup
The LoFi/17 community meetup took place on Tuesday July 30th, with talks by Stepan Parunashvili from Instant ("Writing a Graph-Based Sync Engine"), James Addison ("Shapeshifting media & collaboration"), and James Pearce of TinyBase ("CRDTs are the Easy Part").
Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation
Liang Zhao gives an overview of implementation difficulties and challenges of Movable Tree CRDTs in Loro, a CRDT-based state management system aimed at local-first applications. See also discussion on Hacker News.
localfirst.fm #12 – James Pearce: Tinybase
The latest episode of the localfirst.fm podcast, with guest James Pearce, the author of Tinybase (a reactive data store library for local-first apps). James discusses Tinybase's custom query system, its various persistence and syncing integrations and future roadmap.
"The current frontier for productivity software is local-first and multiplayer"
@astralwave argues that productivity tools like notetaking, todos and project management are a crowded space, but "almost all the [products] suck in profound ways". The "Linear playbook" is to use local-first and multiplayer functionality as a differentiator and moat in a crowded product category.
"The [local-first] tech stack is simpler and easier to teach to devs"
@helioscomm shares highlights from a talk by Brooklyn Zelenka at Our Networks 2024 describing "Agentic computing" which touches on the benefits of a local-first app architecture.
What offline-first means for you
Steffen Bleher, Co-founder of Capacities, explains the importance of transitioning their product to an offline-first architecture.
🛠️ Tools & Resources
Local First with Replicache - How to Build a Full Stack App with Data Syncing Part 1
Scott Tolinski of Syntax.fm presents a tutorial on using Replicache to build real-time collaborative web apps.
Neon self-serve logical replication beta
Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, announced availability of self-serve logical replication (beta), enabling event sourcing architecture to be built with Neon Postgres. Neon previously allowed access to logical replication in December 2023, but then temporarily disabled it until now.
Zero timeline update
Aaron Boodman of Rocicorp who are working on their new Zero sync engine, gave an update on the project's timelines: The first alpha release expected in September will be a Linear clone without Zero abstracted yet into a reusable library. "We expect the beta to follow late this year or early next". (Note: opening the link requires having joined the Replicache Discord server). In the meantime, Rocicorp's Reflect has been retired in anticipation of Zero.
✨ Apps
TinyHub
A local-first GitHub app being built by James Pearce using TinyBase.
How to Contribute
Anyone can contribute to Local-First News with a pull request. Instructions and guidelines available here.