Big announcement!

I'm now a co-founder at @electricsql along with the James/Valter and the brilliant team they've built.

We're solving local caching of Postgres data.

Electric is a VC-backed devtools OSS startup.  We're close to our first beta release so come check us out!

Tech entrepreneur. Founder @electricsql. Founder @gatsbyjs (acquired by Netlify). @kylemathews on Twitter

What is Electric?

Electric maintains local caches of data from Postgres — so instead of querying data, Electric syncs in real-time selected parts of your db to your app or backend service.

Electric updates caches in real-time so your local data is never stale and you never need to check the server to see if there's been updates. This means all client reads can be done to the local cache. Avoiding the network for reads dramatically speeds up apps.

Electric serves data over HTTP meaning that serving data to even millions of clients is trivial as you can use rock-solid http caches like Nginx or CDNs.

With Electric, you simply declare the "shape" of data you want locally and Electric makes sure it's loaded as fast as possible and kept that PG operations are synced in real-time.

It's an imperative -> declarative shift like jQuery -> React. You want PG data in your app or backend service. But imperative approaches like REST APIs make you do a lot of work to get the data and keep updating it.

I spent a year post Gatsby looking around the software world for fundamental improvements I could help with and what we're working on with Electric is I think the most significant.

Cheaply copying data to compute is a really big deal.

For some earlier thoughts on this, see my blog posts on local-first and my local-first podcast:

- https://bricolage.io/some-notes-on-local-first-development/
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For some earlier thoughts on this, see my blog posts on local-first and my local-first podcast:

- https://bricolage.io/some-notes-on-local-first-development/
- https://bricolage.io/localfirst.fm-podcast-latest-thoughts-local-first/

This solves local caching — which is really powerful. Caches are only useful to the degree that they're trustworthy and cheap to maintain.