Viewing profile — jdvh

We've spend the last couple of years building a local-first end-to-end encrypted multiplayer notes app (Thymer). We also explored running sqlite in the browser but ultimately concl…

Hey thanks for mentioning us! With Thymer we really care about performance, but Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted because we don't want to compromise on privacy. And it's real-ti…

In theory you can have these "zero cost abstractions" but in practice I don't think so. The user manual gets thicker. Concepts like 'delete permanently' and backup/restore get more…

Rule of thumb: every 10% increase in complexity cuts your potential user base in half. This is why people make backups by copy-pasting files. This is why Excel is so dominant. This…

You're free to argue that this isn't "pure" CRDT, but the CRDT algorithm still runs normally, just a bit later than it otherwise would.

I don't think that's required, unless you definitionally believe otherwise. When clients disagree about the the order of events and a conflict results then clients can be required …

It's still early, but we have a checkpointing system that works very well for us. And once you have checkpoints you can start dropping inconsequential transactions in between check…

As long as all clients agree on the order of CRDT operations then cycles are no problem. It's just an invalid transaction that can be dropped. Invalid or contradictory updates can …

Completely decentralized is cool, but I think there are two key problems with it. 1) in a decentralized system who is responsible for backups? What happens when you restore from a …

You can think of ejectable as the opposite of being locked-in.

1. Planned, but our first focus is the web app (plus desktop Electron) 2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table, kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create…

In exchange for perpetual development and maintenance costs. Total cost of ownership doesn't go down by rolling your own in-house.

Absolutely. There is no phone-home of any kind.

I think the main problem is lock-in. If you can't get your data out you can't leave. This is true for open source and for commercial products alike. If you own your data and if you…

Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that real…

Because when innovative software isn't made inside the EU then Europeans will simply use the best products made elsewhere.

In the short term a free open source govt alternative may be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the long run. Government projects like these are not likely to reall…

Thymer[1] uses CRDTs for everything. It's an IDE for tasks and planning. It's a multiplayer app, end-to-end encrypted and offline first, optionally self-hosted, and an entire works…

Both "everything in the cloud" and "everything local" have their obvious technical advantages, and I think they are mostly well understood. What really drives the swing of the pend…

Thymer has real-time multiplayer with CRDT based synchronization. With org-mode you can collaborate, but you'd have to DIY with git or something similar. Thymer is also end-to-end …

For the table situation we solve this by have a generic concept of a "card" that is rendered as a table cell when it's the grandchild of a table (table > tr > td) but otherwise it'…

We've looked at Yjs but ultimately decided to write our own thing from scratch. Even scale-ups with thousands of users will have people working on different parts of the document t…

We're using a single end-to-end encrypted document tree synced with CRDTs for our collaborative task IDE[1]. All data for a team is a single tree (graph really, if you count transc…

That's not why Pascal compiles quickly. Resolving undefined symbols isn't difficult or slow, it just means that you have to keep track of what's resolved and what's unresolved and …

I suspect this might be why most open source software struggles to reach the quality of commercial products. If it takes 10 attempts to get the major design questions right a compa…