2025.02.13
📰 News & Discussions
Epsio, IVMs, and Differential Dataflow With Gilad Kleinman
"Gilad Kleinman, CEO of Epsio, talks with me about incremental view maintenance (IVM). We discuss use cases, the history of IVM, how Epsio is different, and where the field is headed."
Frontend, Local-First, Sync Engines
"Web APIs empower the client to be more than just UI. This leads to local-first and sync engines, while also raising the bar for developers. Your role as frontend developer is about to change."
A new protocol for local-first key agreement
From Ink & Switch: "For many documents, you want to collaborate with a trusted group and no others. The default for Automerge today is if someone knows the URL, they can read and write to that document. We needed a way to encrypt documents for groups of collaborators that change over time, and importantly concurrently and without a single source of truth. How do we transparently keep a group’s read access up to date?"
devtools.fm #131: Aaron Boodman - Replicache and Zero, Building Sync Engines for the Web
"This week we talk to Aaron Boodman, a founder of Rocicorp, the company behind Replicache and Zero. They have been innovating in the sync engine space for years and have been working on Zero for a while now."
User-experience, local-first apps, and dev tools 🔧 — with Adam Wiggins (Heroku)
Refactoring Podcast — Season 4 • Episode 2. "Adam is the GM of Platform at The Browser Company and co-founder of Heroku. With Adam, we talked about innovating user experience in software and AI, we discussed what local-first software means and we explored the future of developer tools."
How Goodnotes serves more than 25M monthly active users (talk)
"Learn how Goodnotes scale and serve millions of users with local-first architecture and the challenges they faced."
I wrote a static web page and accidentally started a community (2023)
Blog post about the LoFi community has resurfaced on Hacker News and generated lots of discussion.
WASM will replace containers
"My money is on WebAssembly (WASM) to replace containers. It already has in some places. WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience. (Anywhere that can spin up a V8 engine, which is a lot of places these days.)"
Vue.js Nation 2025: Alexander Opalic ~ Local-First Web Development and How Can We Build It With Vue (talk)
"Alexander Opalic introduces the concept of local-first development, showing how Vue.js can be utilized to build applications that prioritize local data."
Privacy-first architecture (talk)
"Video of my #FOSDEM talk on why developers should remove GDPR popups and use Local-First." - Andrey Sitnik
🛠️ Tools & Resources
Reverse Engineering Linear's Sync Engine: A Detailed Study
"I believe [Linear Sync Engine] is exactly what I've been looking for, so I decided to reverse-engineer its frontend code to understand how it works. Additionally, I'm documenting my findings to help others who are interested as I am."
Patterns for building realtime features
"Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other users, as the changes are happening." See also HN discussion.
OLMoE, meet iOS
"Today, we are taking a significant step in expanding the definition of fully open by releasing a fully open iOS app that allows anyone to test our models on their devices privately and securely." "One key advantage of models like OLMoE are fully private: prompts and responses never leave your device."
Local-First LiveView Svelte ToDo App
"This to-do app is a demo of an installable Phoenix Progressive Web App (PWA) that can sync real-time across multiple devices while also being able to work locally offline."
OakDB
"A nifty local-first database with full-text and vector similarity search. Ideal for desktop apps and personal web apps."
✨ Apps
Zyke Band: Personal Health. Redefined.
"Local-First Architecture: All health insights are processed directly on your phone."
Rotki: Take control of your portfolio with unmatched privacy
"Rotki is an open source, self-hosted portfolio manager, accounting and analytics tool that protects your privacy." "Rotki is a local application that runs on users' computers, ensuring data privacy and control."
LobeChat - personal intelligent assistant
"Enable the PGlite client database to persistently store chat data in your browser and use advanced features like knowledge base."
Ema Plant - Identify & Track
"Local Data Storage: All your data is stored securely on your device—no cloud, no sharing, just privacy." Uses PowerSync
Kitchen Copilot – plan, cook, enjoy
"We went live with PowerSync this week (at Kitchen Copilot), and it's such a great platform. Having a local-first database for a mobile app sped up performance substantially, and will open up opportunities for offline use." - @ScottForsyth
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