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This is really fortuitous timing For...years at this point... I've had it in my mind to write a short, high level guide on how to design systems that have to w

This is really fortuitous timing For...years at this point... I've had it in my mind to write a short, high level guide on how to design systems that have to work while offline. My motivation being: - there's no one size fits all solution - a lot of database products heavily suggest they're one size fits all solution - you can really get lost in the weeds delving into research papers which describe things that don't actually fit your specific problems - you can really screw things up by just doing the simplest possible thing you can think of. But I always held back by thoughts like "you're not a distributed systems researcher, stay in your lane", "some of these approaches you've only read case studies on, you've never put them in production", "almost no one cares about things that work offline, the niche is too small" etc etc. But after a couple of people on HN got in contact with me about it these past few days, I decided to finally bite the bullet and start writing it. Because no one else has.

WA 4y ago
Not sure about the "no one else has", but maybe you can connect with these people and have a look here and contribute your views to the offline-first movement: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/ https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/ https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-first-resources-2acc5836e9d4 https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-first-resources-2acc... https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-database/ https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-da... https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html (Greetings from a guy running an offline-first B2C app with boring CouchDB for 4 years now :))
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Your response really drives home how I need to be careful with terminology, i.e stay away from "offline first". Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of it and I'd read most of those links before. But if I zoom out there's a lot of software solutions that need to work with irregular connectivity, and only a fraction of those would be well suited to being built using a PWA with pouch/couch.

WA 4y ago

Not sure about the "no one else has", but maybe you can connect with these people and have a look here and contribute your views to the offline-first movement: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/ https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/ https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-first-resources-2acc5836e9d4 https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-first-resources-2acc... https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-database/ https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-da... https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html (Greetings from a guy running an offline-first B2C app with boring CouchDB for 4 years now :))

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Your response really drives home how I need to be careful with terminology, i.e stay away from "offline first". Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of it and I'd read most of those links before. But if I zoom out there's a lot of software solutions that need to work with irregular connectivity, and only a fraction of those would be well suited to being built using a PWA with pouch/couch.