Adam Wiggins

Mozilla Careers — Engineering Manager, DOM (Web Standards) or SpiderMonkey (Javascript) — Open Positions Mozilla is hiring a Engineering Manager, DOM (Web Standards) or SpiderMonkey (Javascript) in Remote US, Security, Security, Security, Strategy, Operations, Data & Ads,…

😍 Eng manager job working on storage APIs, workers, etc for Firefox. Relevant to improving local-first apps in the browser! www.mozilla.org/en-US/career...

A line chart with vibe on the Y axis and understanding on the X axis with a downwards diagonal line

A helpful graph made by @stevekrouse.com on the inverse relationship between vibes and understanding in AI assisted code.

Put a few thoughts down here: maggieappleton.com/2025-08-vibe...

Original article: blog.val.town/vibe-code

Kintsugi: Decentralized E2EE Key Recovery Kintsugi is a protocol for key recovery, allowing a user to regain access to end-to-end encrypted data after they have lost their device, but still have their (potentially low-entropy) password. Exist...

📄✨ New paper! Emilie Ma (kewbi.sh) and I looked at the problem of users of end-to-end encrypted apps recovering their private keys if their device is lost, broken, or stolen. We found a cryptographic approach that is decentralised and resilient against social engineering arxiv.org/abs/2507.21122

Automerge TypeScript Maintainer Industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity

Do you write TypeScript? Enjoy Automerge? Love building both tools and community? You might be a great fit for our ✨new✨ Automerge TypeScript Maintainer role!

www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automer...

(Remote role, 🇬🇧 UK-based preferred but not required)

Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...

This pattern is at the core of how @livestore.dev handles sync, offline support, and conflict detection — and it’s been really fun diving deep into it while working on the upcoming course.

If you’ve ever wanted to build local-first apps that sync like magic, this approach is worth understanding.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

Introducing… (Not Boring) Camera

3 years, 100+ prototypes, and wild graphics tech to make our perfect camera. Only to say… forget perfection. Just have fun and capture life’s beautiful chaos. Hope you love it as much as we do—thumbprints and all 🖤

notbor.ing/camera

Johannes Schicking, Nik Graf, Leo Stewen, and myself huddled around a laptop with stickers on it. More people in the background

Me on stage speaking as part of a panel, sitting next to Aaron Boodman

Panel discussion in front of an audience of hundreds at Local First Conf

Me standing and talking to Sam Willis in the conference hallway

Nice impressions from @localfirstconf.com (photography by Susanne Elsässer)

Next week looking plausible! Editing is a surprising amount of work.

Continuing with organizer reflections: bsky.app/profile/adam...

Thanks everyone for coming and making it such a special event ❤️

Will there be a next year?

For 2025, me and the other organizers didn’t meet until November to decide on a sequel. 😅 This time we've already decided to return in 2026—not to mention the sister conference @syncconf.bsky.social‬ in SF this fall.

Last year we were still at the stage of “Oh, people are making money from making local-first software?!”

Now that fact is obvious, and we’ll have to balance vendor talks against more purist content going forward (like every other technical conference).

We under-invested in organizing for the community day (workshops, unconf). Next year we’ll treat this more as a first-class concern.

One challenge here is now we have a mix of people from local-first veterans and researchers in this field for 10+ years, but also local-first-curious folks who are brand new.

Maybe next year we’ll try to label talks and workshops as beginner/intermediate/advanced and balance quantity of each.

Reflections as an organizer of @localfirstconf.com this year

Twice the size (350+ people) and twice as much content (two full days of talks)

I think we did reasonably well on keeping quality up even as we scaled quantity!

Another topic is the connection between the UI layer and the sync layer.

• @schickling.dev‬ extends the “UI = f(state)” React concept into his approach for @livestore.dev‬
• @devagr.bsky.social‬ from @solidjs.com‬ asks why we’re recomputing virtual DOM diffs when we already have data diffs

Lots of demos during talks, which I loved.

It always puts a small on my face to see the “every action next frame” aspect of production local-first systems like Zero and Anytype.

On the big ideas side we had:

• Seph Gentle showing a Bret Victor-like demo of a futuristic OS concept
• bumble.blue/ showing with UX strategies for a local-first world
• @expede.wtf‬ showing the latest research on integrating encryption and key exchange into a sync system

I loved seeing the blend of industry/builders and academic/dreamers.

We heard on-the-ground reports from commercial successes like:
• Linear (project management tool beloved by startups)
• www.ditto.com/ (infra used by customers like Lufthansa)
• www.ocell.io/en-us (forestry management in Europe)

The state-of-the-art has advanced: we’re having lively debates about

• architecture on connecting storage to UI
• offline writes, UI for online/offline visibility, the central role of version history
• whether files can be adapted as a mental model for users

My takeaways from this year's @localfirstconf.com

Last year we collectively were at the stage of “hey this syncing tech is cool, you don’t need the cloud as much” and “hey, we have a community here, who knew?”

This year it felt like the community had more cohesion and sense of identity.

We're counting down days! Here’s Everything You Need to Know for Local-First Conf 2025

The cleverness isn’t in the lenses; it’s in that user-owned fabric. Build it offline-first, merge-friendly, and secure by default, and the rest is just UI paint. Someday today’s file-juggling will feel like punch cards. Let’s start weaving the fabric and sanding the lenses now.

What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games?

We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor.

We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:

Announcing the Local-First Landscape

A comprehensive guide to help developers choose the right tools for building local-first applications.

localfirst.fm/landscape

Sync/local-first fits together beautifully with streaming LLM chats, as illustrated by the videos in this post

👶🏼🎉

Universal Version Control Industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity

Our new research track is called Universal Version Control and it's about exploring how to bring the power of version control to every person, on every kind of document and every kind of collaboration.
www.inkandswitch.com/universal-ve...