Some notes on local-first development

1

Medium

I've been working on mobile apps developed for education in Afghanistan, rural Rwanda, etc for the last 9 years. I used to think that sync was the way, but I have learned from painful experience. 4 (extended): What happens when the user has access to millions of items, but they probably only want a few (e.g. An ebook library catalog)? Do you waste huge amounts of bandwidth and storage to transfer data, of which 99.9% will be useless? We had a situation where the admin user logging in on a project that had been running for years resulted in a sync of 500MB+, 99.99% of that data the admin would never directly use. Also: do you make users wait for all that old data to sync before they can do anything when they login? Relying on sync is basically relying on push-only data access. I think in reality most offline/local first applications will work best when they push what a user probably wants (e.g. Because they selected it for offline sync, starred it, etc) and can pull any other data on demand (in a way that it can be accessed later offline). I've outlined that here: https://medium.com/@mike_21858/auto-generating-an-http-server-and-offline-first-data-layer-based-on-a-room-database-using-kotlin-a24f376db7ef.

#Blogging #Blogging Platform #CMS 2755 social mentions

2

Mochi

#Studying #Education #Spaced Repetition 53 social mentions

3

Linear

We created Linear[1] as local-first product. Back in to 2019 there wasn't much anything available so we created our sync engine. Today we have several thousands companies, from early stage to public companies as paying customers. Our co-founder did talk about sync engine back in 2020 and recently did updated talk about scaling it [3]. The scaling has definitely taken lot of work and optimizing as datasets for company wide workspace with potentially thousands of users ands object they created can become quite large. 1: https://linear.app.

#Project Management #Task Management #Productivity 144 social mentions

4

Obsidian.md

Obsidian[0], as well as many other Zettelkasten applications are local-first. https://obsidian.md.

#Knowledge Management #Knowledge Base #Markdown Editor 1501 social mentions