I'm writing a book about local-first software tentatively called Local-First From Scratch. This is a snippet from that book—an intro to why you should care about local-first software and what it gets you. I thought it ended up being a pretty good summary of what the whole project is about, so I wanted to share it as a blog post as well!
If you picked up this book, you might have some idea about what "local-first" means, but let's get on the same page: other than "works offline", what are we aiming for?
In short, local-first software moves ownership of data from "somewhere in the cloud" to your local devices.
Keep Reading (3 minutes) →I'm writing on a book about local-first software. Instead of doing a survey of all the libraries available, I'm taking a first principles approach. That means doing a lot of explaining CRDTs, syncing, and the like, but I'm having a ton of fun with it so far.
As of March 2025, I have the introduction and first chapter done, and I'm working on the implementation that will end up being built up throughout the book.
I already had one false start where I made a time tracker. This turned out to not cover enough ground to be useful, though: when I tried to make a usergroup presentation on CRDTs using what I had done already, I found pretty big gaps. That means a shift in approach. If you're interested in where I got, you can get the WIP software at bytes-zone/beeps on GitHub.
Despite the false start, I hope to be at the place where beta readers can look at the book in mid-2025!
This and 16 other projects →So I thought I had a pretty good thing going: in my last post, I documented some early results from the time-tracking software that I wrote for Local-First From Scratch. I thought I was on track for an easy conversion to prose, then an easy beta-reading, then becoming a thousandaire and retiring to my private island couch to drink a budget mojito or whatever.
But then… I committed to giving a talk to a local meetup group about implementing CRDTs in Rust.
"Simple!", I thought, "I can just apply the stuff I've already written to a new domain and it'll all work out."
Well… no, not so much.
Keep Reading (4 minutes) →