2026.02.19
đź“° News & Discussions
Open sourcing the Liveblocks sync engine and dev server
"We’ve open sourced our server stack. Starting today, you can run and test your multiplayer applications with a Liveblocks server locally."
LoFi/34 community meetup (upcoming event)
LoFi/34 is scheduled for Tuesday February 24th at 8am PT. 3rd anniversary edition.
From Teddy Bears to Voice Agents: Kraen Hansen on Voice AI, Local-First & App Security
"Together, Ola and Kraen explore technical lessons from several years spent working on Realm and MongoDB, focusing on local-first databases and sync systems, including a TypeScript SDK, as well as Kraen’s more recent work bringing Node-API support to React Native."
MySQL and Postgres are Fine?! A chat with the CEO of Convex
"The discussion connects product and infrastructure lessons across companies: why early career focus should be on becoming useful before leaning on networking, what it felt like to move from scrappy teams to Dropbox’s rapid growth, and why the Dropbox Sync Engine is an unusually hard distributed-systems problem. It then frames Convex as a higher-level cloud abstraction rather than 'a new database,' motivated by removing backend plumbing (REST/JSON/ORM/SQL glue) and extending reactive dataflow to the server—made viable by the React-era client model."
🛠️ Tools & Resources
Designing a Scalable Realtime Sync Engine For 700K+ Users
"When we first wanted to add collaboration to Tasks, we chose CloudKit since it was already powering our user data sync. But as we scaled, we started hitting bottlenecks and received 1000s of emails complaining about syncing. [...] When we first wanted to add collaboration to Tasks, we chose CloudKit since it was already powering our user data sync. But as we scaled, we started hitting bottlenecks and received 1000s of emails complaining about syncing."
oreZ
"oreZ makes Zero work on PGlite (Postgres in WASM) and bedrock-sqlite (SQLite in WASM), bundled together so local development is as simple as bun install && bunx orez."
Introducing the PowerSync Rust Client SDK (Experimental)
"Today we’re announcing an experimental Rust client SDK. The Rust SDK is an early step toward supporting standalone native client environments — systems where PowerSync is embedded directly into a native process, with full control over memory, threading, and storage, without relying on a browser engine, Node.js, a mobile framework, or a managed runtime."
SyncLayer: Build offline-first Flutter apps in minute
"Production-grade sync engine with automatic background synchronization and conflict resolution. Works with REST APIs, Firebase, Supabase, Appwrite, or any custom backend."
PardusDB
"A fast, SQLite-like embedded vector database with graph-based approximate nearest neighbor search"
✨ Apps
QuantDinger: Next-Gen AI Quantitative Trading Platform
"QuantDinger is a local-first, privacy-first, self-hosted quantitative trading infrastructure. It runs on your own machine/server, providing multi-user accounts backed by PostgreSQL while keeping full control of your strategies, trading data, and API keys."
Jarvis
"A private, long-term personal assistant that runs entirely on your own computer. Unlike standard AI chatbots that start every conversation with a blank slate, this system maintains a permanent memory of your tasks, schedule, and preferences in a local file that persists even after a reboot."
reko: Make YouTube videos readable
"By default, reko is local-first and privacy-friendly when used with Ollama, while still supporting paid cloud models when needed."
How to Contribute
Anyone can contribute to Local-First News with a pull request. Instructions and guidelines available here.
Sponsors
Local-First News is sponsored by PowerSync. Interested in sponsoring? Get in touch