2025.04.17

📰 News & Discussions

Carl Sverre on "Storing small things in big places" (talk video)

"Carl Sverre of SQLSync introduces Graft: an open-source transactional storage engine optimized for lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication — perfect for edge, offline-first, and distributed applications."

localfirst.fm #23 – Sujay Jayakar: Dropbox, Convex (podcast episode)

"This episode's guest is Sujay Jayakar, co-founder of Convex and early engineer at Dropbox. In this conversation, Sujay shares the story of how the sync engine powering Dropbox was initially built and later redesigned to address all sorts of distributed systems problems"

Building a Local-First Decentralized Database with IPCM and PGLite

"We’ve done plenty of blog posts on PGLite as it’s a great in-memory Postgres database library and makes it easy to accomplish local-first software. You can even dump the database file and upload it to IPFS and create a backup of your database which can be pretty handy, but what if you could make it work like a sync engine? That’s essentially what we’ve built using IPCM, including its own layer of onchain authentication and minimal CRDT using block timestamps"

Making React Fun Again, with Sync Engines (upcoming talk)

"Join me to explore several emerging sync engines, and learn how to use them in your next project." Talk by Aaron Boodman at React Miami, Friday April 18th, 09:40am ET

The Great Data Escape: AI, Local-First, and the Cloud Exodus

"Local-first is retro. Twenty years ago, Excel was downloaded onto your laptop. You used it without a network connection, and that was that. The local-first movement aims to recapture that level of control while preserving real-time collaboration. With local-first applications, you use a sync system in place of a backend, and your application code reads and writes data to and from your local database."

🛠️ Tools & Resources

Show HN: ActorCore – Stateful serverless framework that runs anywhere

Show HN for ActorCore (previously featured on Local-First News). "Today, ActorCore supports running stateful serverless on Rivet Actors, Cloudflare Durable Objects, Redis, and standalone Node.js/Bun. The most common use cases include applications using collaborative, AI agent, local-first, and per-tenant database features."

Rocal

"Rocal is a local-first-web-development a.k.a LWD driven framework that includes everything you need to make a web application by LWD such as an embedded database, router, backup server etc." See also blog post on DEV Community

MeshCore

"MeshCore is a lightweight, portable C++ library that enables multi-hop packet routing for embedded projects using LoRa and other packet radios. It is designed for developers who want to create resilient, decentralized communication networks that work without the internet." See also HN discussion

✨ Apps

Meet Opera’s AI Browser Operator

"Browser Operator understands your written instructions in natural language using your browser client’s local resources, and our AI Composer Engine processes this information to complete tasks in the browser." "Since operations are performed locally, the user can elegantly shift between the operator control and user control."

HeroUI Chat

"Build stunning UIs just by describing what you want. HeroUI Chat turns your prompts or screenshots into production-ready React code, using our open-source component library". Built using Instant.

Zaturn: Your Co-Pilot For Data Analytics & BI

"I built Zaturn, a local-first, AI-powered data analysis tool that runs as an MCP server (Model Context Protocol). Plug it into clients like Cursor, Claude, or your own MCP setup, and start querying your data sources using natural language." - kdqed on HN

AddTo.me

"A platform that let's you connect multiple apps (like Google Calendar, Notion, Jira, Calendly etc.) and interact with them directly from your Chat Apps (Whatsapp and Telegram) [...] in your natural language." "We have leveraged PowerSync for our client/management app from the beginning and it is magical."

RabbitHoles - Power conversations with A.I. On an Infinite Canvas

"RabbitHoles AI is a canvas-first node-based chat app to chat with AI models." "Local first desktop app" - praneethpike on HN

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