2025.02.20

📰 News & Discussions

Roomy Deep Dive

"A technical deep dive on how Roomy chat works, combining ATProto and Automerge to create a resource-efficient group chat."

"I worked on Figma's sync engine LiveGraph and before that Meteor"

X thread from @imslavko regarding Figma's work on sync engines.

AI agents are local first clients | Sunil Pai

"sync engines finally have a killer app"

A p2p Vision for QUIC (Oct 2024)

"The problem that p2p network engineers hope to solve is the following: How can two nodes that are both behind a NAT, respectively, connect to each other, no matter the kind of NAT? In this post, we explore how QUIC can be leveraged to provide a comprehensive solution for NAT traversal, encompassing everything from address discovery to UDP proxying, potentially simplifying and improving upon traditional p2p networking approaches."

Real-time sync engines | Adam Nyberg

"Real-time sync engines are the next engineering productivity boost 🚀. This post will give you a high-level understanding of how they work and how they make developers more productive."

A Principled Approach to Querying Data

"The rise of local-first web applications demands a rethinking of traditional client-server architectures. Users expect near-native responsiveness, even when offline. This necessitates efficient, client-side data processing, including search. The techniques presented in this article, while discussed in a local-first context, are equally applicable to server-side systems. We’ll explore a type-driven approach, leveraging a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), to create a powerful and maintainable search system."

Distributed real-time collaboration for Writer - a first prototype (talk)

"Come to see a first prototype of a CRDT-based real-time distributed collaboration implementation - for being able to collaboratively comment on a Writer document, from a number of distributed LibreOffice instances (desktop, browser or cloud)." See also article in The Register.

My chaotic journey to find the right database (video)

"Picking the right database is...not easy. Especially if 'local first' is something you want to build for. I'd know. I tried all of them." - @theo

Local-First Web Development With the Help of WebAssembly (upcoming talk)

"In this talk, you’ll learn what the difference is between Local-first and Offline-first and why you may want to choose local-first instead of the traditional web development model. We'll dig into how WebAssembly can help as we create a simple web application that uses Postgres in the browser via PGLite." February 26-28, 2025, Montreal, Canada.

🛠️ Tools & Resources

Dexie Cloud

"We’re super excited to launch Dexie Cloud, the easiest way to add offline-first sync to your web and mobile apps. If you’ve ever struggled with syncing IndexedDB data across devices, Dexie Cloud makes it effortless—with authentication, access control, and real-time sync built-in." - Bennie Forss on Product Hunt.

Why Skip?

"By defining the desired outcome declaratively, Skip generates the necessary logic to keep data live and reactive. It handles complexities like cache invalidation and recomputation efficiently without adding any cognitive burden for the developer."

LiveStore Office Hours #2

"LiveStore Office Hours #2 covering: Another update on the upcoming 0.3.0 release, Devtools improvements & @solid_js integration, Discussion about event sourcing and migrations"

✨ Apps

Roomy Chat - Alpha

"Roomy is an open alternative to Discord, based on ATProto and Automerge. The long-term plan is to be fully p2p and local-first."

Bldrs Share: Local IFC/BIM & CAD

"Local files - no data is uploaded to our servers"

Search Notes AI: ChatGPT for Apple Notes

"All processing is done locally and your data is never sent to our servers." See also Product Hunt.

shrink.video

"shrink.video is a tool that allows you to convert, shrink and optimize your videos directly in your browser, without uploading to the cloud, for free."

Bluesky Inbox

"Bluesky Inbox is a browser-based keyword tracker that respects your privacy. No servers, no costly subscriptions, no artificially imposed limits." Uses PGLite.

Drafft - Game Development Simplified

"Own your data and keep it secure. Use Drafft locally or with your own CouchDB setup — no cloud dependency, no compromises." See also Product Hunt.

Music Journal - Record, reflect and improve your music practice

"Local-first: Your data is yours! All app data is stored locally on your device. We do not collect any data from your device."

TimeRetain

"I built TimeRetain: a time tracker for individuals that runs 100% in your browser. No sign up, no personal data stored" - heresjohnny on HN

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