After six years working on commercial products, happy to say I’m returning to the research world. Today I start as a Researcher-in-Residence at @inkandswitch.com

True peer-to-peer connections without server intermediation remains elusive for local first. Great to see ongoing research in this area.

Kinopio Year-End Investor Report As you may know, Kinopio is organic software that's completely community funded. But if you're reading this, as far as I’m concerned, you’re invested in the future of Kinopio. ↓ 1/10

The first batch of talks are published, the remaining will be published by end of week. 🌟 youtube.com/playlist?lis...

So much good stuff happening at @inkandswitch.com these days! www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/...

We’re hosting @syncconf.bsky.social Community Day and have an open space to drop in, hack, do demos, and connect with others working on sync and related systems. Feel free to drop in during the day, we’ll do a few group discussions in the afternoon. luma.com/l28n75qt

@adamwiggins.bsky.social calling out a lot of important things in his talk: Idealism vs pragmatism in software Preventing data lockin during this AI shift Longevity of software and data preservation

Preview of my @syncconf.bsky.social talk Just five days away now, getting excited!

Getting excited for the conf, just 2.5 weeks away The density of top-notch developers speaking (and attending) is off the charts!

Four of the top minds in web development on stage together! 🔥

It's a huge amount of work to run a CFP process, but also rewarding. Hope to write a debrief post about how we did it at some point.

The Holy Grail for web apps is when my Passkey can unlock local private data.

Sync seems to be having a moment among web developers!

I bought my ticket already and will be there! Figuring out which of my colleagues at @inkandswitch.com might join us, and maybe a little community hacking alongside.

Have something to say about sync engines, local first, or sync as an enabler for AI agents? Submit your talk soon.

Announcing Sync Conf 2025. Join us in SF on Nov 12th.

“The syncing model solves a fundamental challenge of most modern web apps out there, and it does it in a way that feels, well… better.” frontendatscale.com/issues/50/

“The concept is beautifully simple: instead of your app being a fancy form that sends data to a server, it has its own local database. Sometimes the server is just another client to sync with. It can be a fundamental inversion of how we build web applications.” bytemash.net/posts/i-went...

“It’s magical to update a row in Postgres and instantly see the UI reflect that change. This simplifies background tasks, makes multi-device and multi-user flows easier to reason about, and reduces boilerplate. Just write to Postgres and let the sync engine do the rest.” neon.com/blog/tanstac...

😍 Eng manager job working on storage APIs, workers, etc for Firefox. Relevant to improving local-first apps in the browser! www.mozilla.org/en-US/career...

A helpful graph made by @stevekrouse.com on the inverse relationship between vibes and understanding in AI assisted code. Put a few thoughts down here: maggieappleton.com/2025-08-vibe... Original article: blog.val.town/vibe-code

📄✨ New paper! Emilie Ma (kewbi.sh) and I looked at the problem of users of end-to-end encrypted apps recovering their private keys if their device is lost, broken, or stolen. We found a cryptographic approach that is decentralised and resilient against social engineering arxiv.org/abs/2507.21122

Do you write TypeScript? Enjoy Automerge? Love building both tools and community? You might be a great fit for our ✨new✨ Automerge TypeScript Maintainer role! www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automer... (Remote role, 🇬🇧 UK-based preferred but not required)

Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...

This pattern is at the core of how @livestore.dev handles sync, offline support, and conflict detection — and it’s been really fun diving deep into it while working on the upcoming course. If you’ve ever wanted to build local-first apps that sync like magic, this approach is worth understanding.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

Introducing… (Not Boring) Camera 3 years, 100+ prototypes, and wild graphics tech to make our perfect camera. Only to say… forget perfection. Just have fun and capture life’s beautiful chaos. Hope you love it as much as we do—thumbprints and all 🖤 notbor.ing/camera

Nice impressions from @localfirstconf.com (photography by Susanne Elsässer)

Reflections as an organizer of @localfirstconf.com 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!

My takeaways from this year's @localfirstconf.com 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 identity.

We're counting down days! Here’s Everything You Need to Know for Local-First Conf 2025

The cleverness isn’t in the lenses; it’s in that user-owned fabric. Build it offline-first, merge-friendly, and secure by default, and the rest is just UI paint. Someday today’s file-juggling will feel like punch cards. Let’s start weaving the fabric and sanding the lenses now.

What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games? We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor. We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:

Announcing the Local-First Landscape A comprehensive guide to help developers choose the right tools for building local-first applications. localfirst.fm/landscape

Sync/local-first fits together beautifully with streaming LLM chats, as illustrated by the videos in this post

Our new research track is called Universal Version Control and it's about exploring how to bring the power of version control to every person, on every kind of document and every kind of collaboration. www.inkandswitch.com/universal-ve...

Today we're launching the new tldraw ai module. If you're a developer and want to experiment with LLMs on a whiteboard, this is for you.

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: refactoring.fm/p/user-expe...

What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time? That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously. 1/2

It's riveting seeing how fast the "build vs buy" tradeoff is shifting in software. This is a perfect example from @randomwalker.bsky.social : he built a little reading app with ChatGPT, rather than trying to find an existing one. x.com/random_walke...

Reluctantly spent part of the weekend trying to interpret the DeepSeek R1 manic panic happening on the hell site. Took a minute, but wrote myself notes to clarify the basics: maggieappleton.com/2025-01-deep... TLDR; a cheaper, higher-quality, open-source reasoning model for everyone. Net good.

Sketchpad running on the iPad! (This is my plug for the @inkandswitch.com wrapper, check it out at github.com/inkandswitch...)

Local-First Conf is back! Tickets are now officially on sale: localfirstconf.com Join us on May 27th - 28th for two days of insights, learning, fun, and chat. We hope to see you there

Local-First Conf is back – 27-28 May in Berlin! Last year it sold out in a week, so if you want to come this year, best to grab a ticket soon www.localfirstconf.com

⚡️ Come work at https://thebrowser.company/careers ⚡️ Hiring for Product Ops! • 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?

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/... Table of contents:

❄️ Winter break hack project ❄️ Sorting my email (Inbox, FYI, Junk) using gpt-4o, fine tuned gpt-4o-mini, Lllama, and DistilBERT.

The accounting tool Bench shut down with no warning 3 days before the end of the year. They had raised $110m in venture capital. The app is no longer accessible. There will be a way to export your data, but it's not available yet. File over app is not just for individuals.

I've built FizzBuzz in @tldraw.com computer! Such a creative tool—lots of potential for teaching newcomers programming.

At @inkandswitch.com we are starting a new project to research better version control tools for making games. One hypothesis: collaborating on a game should initially be as simple as working on a Google Doc, with concepts like branching introduced gradually as needed.