Ahead of my flight to Berlin I downloaded a dozen episodes of localfirst.fm thinking I'd listen to them on the flight. Spotify was almost entirely unusable on the United wifi, showing yet again that the most ironic outcome is the most likely. Extra ironic was when a speaker at the conference claimed that Spotify was local-first...

Spotify devs: you have until next year's conference to fix this.

Can we finally agree?

The most surprising development at this year's conference was the adoption of the term "sync". Sync Conf was announced, and now at least three major vendors in the space (Electric, Zero and PowerSync) refer to themselves as sync instead of local-first. Electric also announced that what they're building is a "sync stack" - little composable pieces with which you can cobble together your own synced app.

After this conference, I think pragmatic SaaS-loving folks will prefer the term sync, and privacy-loving folks will prefer local-first, and I hope to see good cross polination between these two camps. I also hope the debate about whether a product is local-first or not will finally come to rest.

On to the rest of the post.

Did it feel like a conference?

I set out to have fun at the conference, and much fun was had. This was the least corporate conference I've ever attended 💜

Although... there was still the usual vendor self-promotion. Which is totally fine. But should we as the sync/local-first developer community be concerned that one of the main organizers of the conference used it as a platform to launch his product? Like, should we feel weird about that? Also, is it weird that all the organizers are connected to ElectricSQL?

Anyway... I'm super glad that I went. Here's my force-ranked list of FTTH (Fun Things That Happened)

Hanging out with some of the PowerSync team - we traveled from 3 continents 😎
Speaking to customers - I bumped into more than expected! In fact, one of them twisted Simon's arm and I guess we're fast-tracking experimental APIs to use raw tables in SQLite
The talk I enjoyed the most was Matthew Weidner's. I also got to have lunch with him and... *checks notes*... realized he mentioned PowerSync in his very creative blog post describing a collaborative text-editing algorithm that doesn't require CRDTs
Meeting other builders in the space:
1. A long chat with Alex Good, the maintainer of Automerge, at the speaker's dinner
2. Martin Klepmann joining me for breakfast, and learning he wasn't religiously attached to the definition of local-first
3. Beers with the Daniel Steigerwald, the Evolu guy, who is ULTRA religious about the definition of local-first. If you ever need a SQL implementation of Range-Based Set Reconciliation, he's your guy
4. A 20-minute walk and talk with Aaron from Zero, who admired my pants (hey Aaron - these are the pants)
Undoubtedly the most entertaining talk, measured in Intervals Between Laughs (mins) and Laughter Volume (dB), was "Learn just enough about Chrome built-in AI to be productive" by Thomas Steiner from the Google Chrome team. If you only watch one talk, watch this one!

Random anecdotes

It was weird AND awesome to be shoulder to shoulder with so many competitors. I'd love for this friendly & weird spirit of sportmanship to form the basis of competitive culture in the sync/local-first space, rather than dirty tricks like you often see in commoditized markets. I even think there is potential for collaboration between vendors. Microsoft integrated Dropbox into Word, right?

In my case, all three "bring your own database" vendors (Eletric, Zero and PowerSync) have written some form of Postgres WAL interpreter. We are all maintaining our implementations too. PowerSync has invested a lot into support for MongoDB and MySQL, but it would be kinda sad to see the other vendors solving the same problems, making the same mistakes we did, etc. OTOH, multi-vendor projects can become notoriouly political as each vendor typically pushes their own requiremenets/agenda, so perhaps a bit early for this.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, where our CTO Ralf lent a helping hand to the Electric team https://github.com/electric-sql/electric/issues/1548#issuecomment-2304736095

Speaking of colaboration

This was mentioned on the conference discord. IMO we are waaaay too early for a standard. Everyone is still figuring out what the right way is to do things at all. It will take us some time to figure this all out.

Speaking of standards

Adam from Ditto dropped the news: the EU’s Digital Markets Act killed Apple's proprietary AWDL standard, in favor of the open Wi-Fi Aware standard. The EU, for all its flaws, really does some wondrous things. Like mandating USB-C on iPhones, allowing the sideloading of apps, and now, cross-platform P2P Wi-Fi standards. Hopefully they get the protocol right to allow long-lived connections — "send a user some files" is nice and all, but not really an inspiring vision of where this could go.

Summary of where things stand

We're clearly seeing the rise of "sync" as a term to clarify much of the confusion around "local-first"
At the same time there are very promising developments in local-first such as the Beelay work coming out of Ink & Switch
It is my personal hope that we see a sustained culture of cross-pollination and collaboration across these disciplines
There are many sync tools to choose from, and there is a wide spread of maturity across these tools
It's not clear yet what the right primitives and abstractions for sync tools are, and it's great to see so many different approaches being taken

Oh and a huge thank you

Thank you to the conference organizers! That must have been a lot of effort to pull off. Everyone I spoke to loved the single-track format, please keep it that way!