A podcast about local-first software development
The guest of this episode is James Long, the creator of local-first app called Actual Budget and the absurd-sql project which helped to pave the way to bring SQLite back to the browser. This conversation will explore his journey of building Actual Budget including implementing a syncing solution from scratch and expanding from an Electron app to mobile and the web while re-using most of the code.
The guest of this episode is Rasmus Anderson, who helped to build many monumental products such as Spotify, Dropbox and Figma and is now working on Playbit, a local-first operating system built from scratch.
This extended conversation will go deep on software quality, the tradeoffs of different data models and the importance of the web for modern applications.
The guest of this episode is Kyle Matthews, who, in the past, founded Gatsby JS and is currently delving into local-first software.
In the conversation, Kyle shares his experiences in building some small-scale local-first apps for his personal use and discusses how the utilization of a data syncing engine liberates significant development time.
The guest of this episode, Martin Kleppmann, is one of the authors of the original local-first essay. Martin has been exploring local-first software and CRDTs for over 10 years, which has led to the creation of Automerge, which we discuss in depth in this episode. This episode is also exploring the ideas of generic sync servers and the impact this technology could have on local-first software in the future.
In this episode we talk about Geoffrey's background in malleable software and how relational databases can be leveraged to build better web apps and improve data ownership. A topic he extensively investigates through the Riffle research project.
In this episode we talk about Aaron's history in local-first, which goes back to 2008 with the release of Google Gears – the first time sqlite was added to the browser - and his perspective on where we're at now and why local-first is finally happening.
In this inaugural episode, I'm speaking to Peter van Hardenberg, who helped to coin and popularize the term Local First. As the director of the Ink & Switch Research Lab, he's been on the forefront of this work for the better part of a decade. My conversation with him today starts with the basics of what Local First is and why you, an application developer, should care about it.