2025.05.08

📰 News & Discussions

Beyond the Cloud: The Local-First Software Revolution • Brooklyn Zelenka & Julian Wood • GOTO 2025

"Distributed systems researcher Brooklyn Zelenka unpacks the paradigm shift of local-first computing, where applications primarily run on users' devices and synchronize seamlessly without central servers."

localfirst.fm #24 – Ben Holmes: Astro, Simple Sync Engine & Warp

"The guest of this episode is Ben Holmes, a senior web developer and educator known for his whiteboard videos. After having spent most of his career building server-centric applications, Ben recently explored local-first software by building a simple sync engine which we talk through in-depth."

Escaping the Network Tarpit

"Modern software involves constantly moving app state over the network. Yet networks are imperfect..." – @cahofmeyr

Introducing Phoenix.Sync - ElixirConf EU 2025 (upcoming conference talk)

"This talk introduces Phoenix.Sync, a new library that adds real-time sync to Postgres-backed Phoenix applications." - 15-16 May, Kraków & Virtual

🛠️ Tools & Resources

PocketSync

"Build apps that work offline and sync effortlessly across devices with our lightweight, developer-friendly solution."

Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB in 2025

"[C]onsider this an up-to-date, best practises demo app for Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB. We’re using Svelte 5 with Vite as build tooling and Pico.css for styles." See also HN discussion.

@TanStack/optimistic

"A library for creating fast optimistic updates with flexible backend support that pairs seamlessly with sync engines (like ElectricSQL)."

✨ Apps

LiveBooks

"I'm actually building a QuickBooks Desktop alternative called LiveBooks. It's focused on simple, local-first accounting. Still in early development" - u/Revolutionary-Toe661 on Reddit

LocoStudio: A better UI for local AI chat

"I’m excited to share LocoStudio, a local-first AI chat app for Mac that lets you chat with AI models both locally and in the cloud—all in one place." - simmy345 on HN

Wordwise

"I built a local-first language app to track and retain words" - andrcodes on HN

Humanlog

"Local-first log query engine (and tracing too, soon). You feed it your logs and you can search them, aggregate them, and soon make some graphs and dashboards with them. It started as just a CLI tool to parse and make structured logs pretty, and now I'm turning it into a full observability tool on your machine." - AYBABTME on HN

Offcast - A web-based local-first podcast player

"I listen to many podcasts weekly and wanted to try out local-first web technologies (Cache API, Service Workers, IndexedDB). This is a pretty bare MVP with search (using iTunes catalogue), adding podcasts, and downloading episodes." - u/uutangohotel on Reddit

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