New blog post on what I'm observing in the local-first world and where I think it's going. In short, I think it's a big upgrade for the web. It's giving me the same vibes as the React community circa 2014.

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

We had tightly coupled web frameworks in the Rails/Django years and lost them with the shift to API-powered SPAs. At the heart of the local-first approach is database-grade sync technology—which will recouple our application stacks allowing for a new era of framework innovation.

Why now? Pioneers like Figma and Linear are showing how much better local-first products can be. A number of startups and open source projects are making their approach available to everyone.

I think there's a good chance that the sync engines powering local-first will replace traditional APIs in rich client apps.

Many issues to solve though before that can happen. I look in detail at one — how to do CRUD with CRDT-based Sync Engines (the most common approach). There's a very elegant solution with distributed state machines with nice advantages over traditional request/response models.

The three main approaches people are taking with local-first are:

- replicated data structures like yjs and Jazz w/ js data types that sync
- Replicated Database Tables that sync Postgres to SQLite in client
- The unique "Replication as a Protocol" approach Replicache is taking

Should you jump in? It's definitely early still but for the right teams, a really exciting time to build innovative world-class experiences with cutting edge tech. The tools really shine for real-time, multiplayer, and offline use cases.

There's a very active community that's developed. Jump into the Discord channels and online meetups & play around with the demos.

Happy Building!

https://bricolage.io/some-notes-on-local-first-development/

Local-first development is gaining steam as a new paradigm for building rich client apps. Allows syncing data to local DB for faster CRUD, simpler state management and built-in realtime/offline.