2025.04.10

📰 News & Discussions

Put your database in the browser with Ben Holmes (podcast episode)

"Ben Holmes, product engineer at Warp, joins PodRocket to talk about local-first web apps and what it takes to run a database directly in the browser. He breaks down how moving data closer to the user can reduce latency, improve performance, and simplify frontend development."

How to Sync Anything

"In this article I’ll discuss a common naive solution to replication, why it doesn’t work, and what the building blocks of a good solution look like. Having established this theoretical framework, my next article will look at how CouchDB provides many of those building blocks such that replicating from it into any other system is relatively painless."

Building AI apps? You need sync

"AI apps are inherently collaborative. Building them requires solving resumability, interruptibility, multi‑device and multi‑user. [...] Luckily, they're all solved by sync."

Love/Hate: Upgrading to Web2.5 with Local-First - Kyle Simpson - dotJS 2025 (talk)

"Talk recorded on April 3, 2025, at the 10th edition of the dotJS conference, organized in Paris, at the Folies Bergère theater."

Byzantine Eventual Consistency and Local-first Access Control

"Slides from a talk given at the 12th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), Rotterdam, Netherlands, 31 March 2025." By Martin Kleppmann.

Unlocking Developer Productivity with Local-First Tools (upcoming event)

"Join Brian Rinaldi, LocalStack, and John Britton, Workbrew, to explore how local-first development can eliminate cloud friction, simplify environment setup, and accelerate workflows." Thursday, 17 April, 2025, 12pm EST / 9am PST, online

Making React Fun Again, with Sync Engines (upcoming talk)

"Join me to explore several emerging sync engines, and learn how to use them in your next project." Talk by Aaron Boodman at React Miami, Friday April 18th, 09:40am ET

What is Local first development - Hacker News

Article from November 2024 did the rounds on Hacker News again this past week and generated discussion.

🛠️ Tools & Resources

Fugue: fractional indexing without conflicts

Fugue is a lightweight library for generating conflict-free fractional indexing keys that guarantee ordering and grow logarithmically. It can easily be used with libraries like Zero to generate deterministic database positions for sorting that don't conflict with simultaneous edits by users.

Electric Cloud public BETA: Sync in 30 seconds

"Electric Cloud is our managed service for our open-source Postgres sync engine. It solves the hard problems of sync for you, including partial replication, fan-out, and data delivery."

Turso + Expo: Build offline-first mobile apps, without the sync struggle

"Build real offline-first apps with Expo and Turso. Sync seamlessly, eliminate backend complexity, and ship faster with local-first architecture."

✨ Apps

WhisperRecorder

"local-first speech-to-text-to-clipboard menubar app" - roman01la on HN

How to Contribute

Anyone can contribute to Local-First News with a pull request. Instructions and guidelines available here.