Local-first software (2019)

In theory, I love the local-first mode of building. It aligns well with “small tech” philosophy where privacy and data ownership are fundamental.

In practice, it’s hard! You’re effectively responsible for building a sync engine, handling conflict resolution, managing schema migration, etc.

This said, tools for local-first software development seem to have improved in the past couple years. I keep my eye on jazz.tools, electric-sql, and Rocicorp’s Zero. Are there others?

CouchDB on the server and PouchDB on the client was an attempt at making such an environment:

- https://couchdb.apache.org/

- https://pouchdb.com/

Also some more pondering on local-first application development from a "few" (~10) years back can be found here: https://unhosted.org/