The Heart of Local First Development

Why Local First

Local First is a far from perfect way of developing software. It is new and therefore it will take time to mature. Local First as a movement comes with many ideals that will not explicitly be outlined in this essay.

Local First is both a looking forward and a looking towards the past. It is both a recognition of the great advances we have made in software as well as a recognition of the ways in which we have made software incredibly complex.

Local First is somewhat of a grievance against everything being software as a service and only getting access to things if we pay the remainder of our lives for them. It is a harkening back to the days when you could purchase physical software and use it until your computer died.

Microsoft Works

You read that right. Microsoft Works.

My dad is 65 years old and one of the stories that comes up occassionally for him as a small business owner is how incredible Microsoft Works was for his buisness. He could create databases, spreadsheets, invoices, and manage all of his customers and inventory in one program.

With the advent of the subscription model Microsoft Works gradually faded away as it was not updated or made available any longer and Microsoft Office was split out into many different programs that all needed to be purchased or bundled.

Your Data in the Cloud

If you think about the heading for a minute and if we get a bit extreme, having data in the cloud will always lead to lockin.

Why? Because it is really no longer yours. If you do get your data you have to find somewhere to keep/store it. But then if you do get your data you don't really have a way to interact with it any more these days, at least from an application perspective.

The cloud is not bad. In fact, most likely many different implementations of Local First are still utilizing the cloud in some way.

The primary difference is that Local First puts data on device, like a native application, and syncs it to the cloud.

Home Baked software

At the Local First Conference in 2024, Maggie Appleton gave a talk that I have been referring to as a sort of plea to restore humans to the center of software development.

Software is meant to solve problems and better our lives. Not consume us and take us out of our world.

Local First development by dramatically reducing the complexity of building software gives greater opportunity for more people to participate in the development of software, solve pain, and meet real human needs in the world.

This is why we are excited for the future of Local First.

Is it ready? Kind of. There are still many problems to solve. But we believe that we can start building software this ways and helping others build and solve real world problems.