RT @inkandswitch: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps.

Continuing the chain of thought:

Lastly: will there be a next year?. For 2025, me and the other organizers didn’t meet until November to decide on a sequel. This time we’ve already decided to do 2026 :-) —not to mention the sister conference @sync_conf in SF this fall. Thanks everyone for coming and making it.

Last year we were still at the stage of “Oh, people are making money from making local-first software?!”. Now that fact is obvious, and we’ll have to balance vendor talks against more purist content going forward (like every other technical conference).

We under-invested in organizing for the community day (workshops, unconf). Next year we’ll treat this more as a first-class concern.

One challenge here is now we have a mix of people from local-first veterans and researchers in this field for 10+ years, but also local-first-curious folks who are brand new. Maybe next year we’ll try to label talks and workshops as beginner, intermediate, or advanced and makes.

Reflections as an organizer of @localfirstconf this year. Twice the size (350+ people) and twice as much content (two full days of talks). I think we did reasonably well on keeping quality up even as we scaled quantity!.

Another topic is the connection between the UI layer and the sync layer. • @schickling extends the “UI = f(state)” React concept into his approach for @livestoredev.• @devagrawal09 from @solid_js asks why we’re recomputing virtual DOM diffs when we already have data diffs from.

Lots of demos during talks, which I loved. It always puts a small on my face to see the “every action next frame” aspect of production local-first systems like @zero__ms and @AnytypeLabs.

On the big ideas side we had:. • @josephgentle showing a Bret Victor-like demo of a futuristic OS concept.• showing with UX strategies for a local-first world.• showing the latest research on integrating encryption and key.

I loved seeing the blend of industry/builders and academic/dreamers. We heard pragmatic, on-the-ground reports from commercial successes like:.• @linear (project management tool beloved by startups).• @dittolive (infra used by customers like Lufthansa).•.

The state-of-the-art has advanced: we’re having lively debates about. - architecture on connecting storage to UI.- offline writes, UI for online/offline visibility, the central role of version history.- whether files can be adapted as a mental model for users.- the still largely.

My takeaways from this year's @localfirstconf. Last year we collectively were at the stage of “hey this syncing tech is cool, you don’t need the cloud as much” and “hey, we have a community here, who knew?”. This year it felt like the community had more cohesion and sense of.

Incredible work from this team—deep research with the rigor and control of systematic review.

Recently got to chat with @lucaronin on Refactoring podcast!. We talked about the overlap between AI, data ownership, and local-first software; problem-first vs technology-first solutions; and complexity homeostasis for dev tools. Listen here:

RT @localfirstconf: Local-First Conf is back! . Tickets are now officially on sale: Join us on May 27th - 28th for….

⚡️ Come work with me at @browsercompany ⚡️. Are you good at product thinking and understanding users via support feedback and analytics? Can you wrangle structured data formats such as spreadsheets/CSV/JSON/YAML?. And are you dabbling in AI-related skills including prompt.

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But the bar is incredibly high with this team. Hoping I can make a meaningful contribution in helping continue to make Arc the best power-user browser, and helping to bring the new product into the world. Exciting times ahead! ✨.