indepndent researcher

Disclaimer: These briefs are for my own personal purposes. For more checkout updates at https://bsky.app/profile/localfirstconf.com.

Notes in red are my annotations. Yellow marks are highlights.

Day 1

Talk 1: Playbit sync from Rasmus Andersson

my nerd crush too

• intro

  • whose paintbrush is software
  • an alternative mental space
  • computer that transcends software
  • make fewer but interesting software
  • personal scale software
  • we need a fresh start
  • a fun app with friends

• philosophy: first principles

  • work is play (annotated)

  • 20% right 80% wrong if you do things right: everything

  • control your source tree

    • comprehension
      • write my own: deep
      • shallow: use someone else’s
    • have deep understanding: just copy paste from frameworks/libraries

  • start simple: complexity grows

  • we fight entropy, but complexity is a fact

  • performance: expensive to add later

  • a definition of quality in the context of software

    • reliable
    • cohesive
    • resposnive
    • polished
      • people come for the feature but stay for the polish/care
    • affordable quality
      • focus on the parts that users touch
        • bike analogy: plastics
    • longetivity
      • how can you run this once i’m gone
      • how much effort should i put into thhis
      • degrade gracefully

  • principles

    

  • demo

    • with edward playing tictactoe, playful collab software
    • showed the code, there is no framework involved, its right there in the OS

  • signup for alpha: https://playb.it/alpha/

  • architecture: a practical approach to philosphy

    • storage

      

    • trasnactional boundary

      

    • bouncing balls in demo are actually state syncing between clients

    • files warranted a distinct model

    • conflict resolution

    • access and permissions

      • keeyhiv mention: https://www.inkandswitch.com/keyhive/notebook/

    • hybrid model is right: thats what figma uses

      • dosesnt matter if its crdt or not, just pragmatic

      

• sprinkle some centraliszation on a decentralized model

• theres more to syncing than syncing

  • playbit is not being built just because they want to make it beautful, its in the service of users

• theyre a real company, and hiring sync engines infra engineers

• questions

  • biz model?
    • freemium
      • give backeup engines, computer in software
      • always remain open source and free
    • why not browser?
      • native cross compilation to targets, including wasm for wasi
      • web is the primary target
      • send my friends a link: not punish them for installing an appp

• notes

  • more context on playbit from their discord server

  

Talk 2: General-purpose sync with IVM by Aaron Boodman from Rocicorp working on Zero

• what if… you could just write queries
• query-driven sync
• architecture discussion