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Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

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Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#61

Post by delusional »

jitl wrote: post #21
incorrecthorse wrote: post #20

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

A web request to a data center even with a very fast backend server will struggle to beat 8ms (120hz display) or even 16ms (60hz display), the budget for next frame painting a navigation. You need to have the data local to the device and ideally already in memory to hit 8ms navigation.

I can't help but feel this is missing the point. Ideally, next refresh click latency is a fantastic goal, we're just not even close to that.

For me, on the web today, the click feedback for a large website like YouTube is 2 seconds for first change and 4 seconds for content display. 4000 milliseconds. I'm not even on some bad connection in Africa. This is a gigebit connection with 12ms of latency according to fast.com.

If you can bring that down to even 200ms, that'll feel comparatively instantaneous for me. When the whole internet feel like that, we can talk about taking it to 16ms

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#62

Post by h4ch1 »

mentalgear wrote: post #28
mkarliner wrote: post #25

Meteor was/is a very similar technology. And I did some fairly major projects with it.

Meteor was amazing, I don't understand why it never got sustainable traction.

Seems like meteor is still actively developed and is Framework agnostic! https://github.com/meteor/meteor

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#63

Post by jallmann »

incorrecthorse wrote: post #20

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

Linear is actually so slow for me that I dread having to go into it and do stuff. I don’t care if the ticket takes 500ms to load, just give me the ticket and not a fake blinking cursor for 10 seconds or random refreshes while it (slowly) tries to re-sync.

Everything I read about Linear screams over-engineering to me. It is just a ticket tracker, and a rather painful one to use at that.

This seems to be endemic to the space though, eg Asana tried to invent their own language at one point.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#64

Post by thrown-0825 »

mentalgear wrote: post #28
mkarliner wrote: post #25

Meteor was/is a very similar technology. And I did some fairly major projects with it.

Meteor was amazing, I don't understand why it never got sustainable traction.

Tight coupling to MongoDB, fragmented ecosystem / packages, and react came out soon after and kind of stole its lunch money.

It also had some pretty serious performance bottlenecks, especially when observing large tables for changes that need to be synced to subscribing clients.

I agree though, it was a great framework for its day. Auth bootstrapping in particular was absolutely painless.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#65

Post by qweiopqweiop »

It's starting to feel to me that a lot of tech is just converging on other platforms solutions. This for example sounds incredibly similar to how a mobile app works (on the surface). Of course it goes the other way too, with mobile tech taking declarative UIs from the Web.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#66

Post by wooque »

andy99 wrote: post #56
incorrecthorse wrote: post #20

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

I also winced at "impossibly fast" and realize that it must refer to some technical perspective that is lost on most users. I'm not a front end dev, I use linear, I'd say I didn't notice speed, it seems to work about the same as any other web app. I don't doubt it's got cool optimizations, but I think they're lost on most people that use it. (I don't mean to say optimization isn't cool)

Second this. I use Linear as well and I didn't noticed anything close to "impossibly fast", it's faster than Jira for sure, but nothing spectacular.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#67

Post by owebmaster »

petralithic wrote: post #18

ElectricSQL and TanStack DB are great, but I wonder why they focus so much on local first for the web over other platforms, as in, I see mobile being the primary local first use case since you may not always have internet. In contrast, typically if you're using a web browser to any capacity, you'll have internet. Also the former technologies are local first in theory but without conflict resolution they can break dow…

Because web apps run in a web browser, which is the opposite of a local first platform.

Local-first is actually the default in any native app

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#69

Post by jitl »

Aldipower wrote: post #49
yanis_t wrote: post #43

I don't get it. You still have to sync the state one way or another, network latency is still there.

Me neither. Considered we are talking about collaborative network applications, you are loosing the single-source-of-thruth (the server database) with the local first approach. And it just adds so much more complexity. Also, as your app grows, you probably end up to implement the business logic twice. On the server and locally. I really do not get it.

You can use the same business logic code on both the client and server.

With the Linear approach, the server remains the source of truth.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#70

Post by dijit »

wooque wrote: post #66
andy99 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also winced at "impossibly fast" and realize that it must refer to some technical perspective that is lost on most users. I'm not a front end dev, I use linear, I'd say I didn't notice speed, it seems to work about the same as any other web app. I don't doubt it's got cool optimizations, but I think they're lost on most people that use it. (I don't mean to say optimization isn't cool)

Second this. I use Linear as well and I didn't noticed anything close to "impossibly fast", it's faster than Jira for sure, but nothing spectacular.

If you get used to Jira, especially Ubisofts internally hosted Jira (which was in an oversubscribed 10yo server that was constantly thrashing and hosted half a world away) ... well, it's easy for things to feel "impossibly fast".

In fact in the Better Software Conference this year there were people discussing the fact that if you care about performance people think your software didn't actually do the work: because they're not used to useful things being snappy.

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