lab notes
Most desktop, mobile, and web apps use a form-based metaphor to manipulate the state of the digital objects sitting in the database. This is a little odd when you think about it. Most things in the real-world don't work like this, aside from our complex machines. What would
lab notes
I started outlining how to compose different CRDTs together to make an Immutable Conflict-free Resolution Relations [1] construction, based on the Merkle Search Tree. When designing it, I first tried sketching out the entire construction by drawing, but I was left confused. I wasn't sure if all the
lab notes
I been reading various papers on CRDTs to deepen my understanding of them. That's when I happened upon a paper that constructed Merkle-CRDTs from Merkle-DAGs [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.00107.pdf]. > Surprisingly, the internal merkle data structure of Git is like a vector clock. It establishes
lab notes
A major implication not often included in discussions of local-first software is how to deal with migrations. The degree of the problem depends largely on how you fence the boundaries of your system. If your local-first system allows any number of replicas to come in and out of the network
lab notes
SQL is the new QWERTY. It's a strong enough network effect that we'll have to keep living with it. I don't mind the declarative nature of SQL, but I do wish it was more composable and abstractable. While there is the WITH clause, it&
lab notes
In the course of building the demo todo list local-first app, I've found that different CRDT libraries have different assumptions about the data access pattern you're using. Automerge [https://github.com/automerge/automerge] and Yjs [https://github.com/yjs/yjs] prioritize text editing, but Automerge assumes
lab notes
This week the todo list is coming along. The app works like a regular todo list. There's no server, and yet it persists the data between reloads. I wanted to see how it would feel to have a database as the state management library. Instead of having an
lab notes
I'm making progress with the todo list. While I can only add tasks right now, it persists the data without a server and can sync between different open tabs (within the same browser). I've built my share of web apps before, yet I've never
lab notes
The couple of months have been full of changes. It was actually a good time to write down the process, but unfortunately, things changed so quickly that I didn't get a chance to process it all in writing. This is an outline from since the last time. A
ai-assist
👉This is a conversation with ChatGPT to ask it to help me with a task that I wouldn't have otherwise invested the time to figure out how to do. This was before ChatGPT let you share your conversations.> What would I use to generate a histogram of
programming
I was surprised to learn that different stacks of software all do some type of computational analysis to better do its job. The CPU does it to figure out how to pipeline instructions. Compilers do it to feed CPUs better set of instructions. Front-end frameworks do it to figure out
lab notes
One major thing I did in the last two weeks was to take a step back and review the current landscape of real-time databases and syncing frameworks. In my last essay [https://interjectedfuture.com/state-management-library-front-ends-are-looking-for-is-a-database/] , I came to the conclusion that for app architectures that want to retain state on