“And so here's what we're going to talk about:

Local-first Beyond Local Data
Home Cooked vs Industrial Software
My Pitch for Barefoot Developers
Why Language Model Legos Need Glue
How We Can Bake Local-first Into Everything.”

“My friend Kasey Klimes wrote a fantastic piece called “When to Design for Emergence” on the design dynamics of large-scale software after working on Google Maps.

He points out that our current approach is designed to only solve the most common needs of the most number of users.

Anything beyond that is what we call the long tail of user needs. These are things only a few people need, but there's a nearly infinite amount of them.”

“small-scale, specific software [is] the land of opportunity”

“[Barefoot developers] are people who are technically savvy and interested in solving problems for themselves and people around them, but don't want to become fully-fledged programmers.

(…)

At the moment, they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits.

They are the kinds of people who would be thrilled to have more agency and power over computers.

(…)

But they never make it over what I call the command line wall.”