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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

#91

Post by wim »

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.

Funny how reasonable performance is now treated as some impossible lost art on the web sometimes.

I posted a little clip [1] of development on a multiplayer IDE for tasks/notes (local-first+e2ee), and a lot of people asked if it was native, rust, GPU rendered or similar. But it's just web tech.

The only "secret ingredients" here are using plain ES6 (no frameworks/libs), having data local-first with background sync, and using a worker for off-UI-thread tasks. Fast web apps are totally doable on the modern web, and sync engines are a big part of it.

[1] https://x.com/wcools/status/1900188438755733857

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

#92

Post by dminik »

mike_hearn wrote: post #84
imiric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you are running some really complicated globally distributed backend your roundtrip will always be higher than 80ms for all users outside your immediate geographical area. The bottleneck is not the roundtrip time. It is the bloated and inefficient frontend frameworks, and the insane architectures built around them. Here's the creator of Datastar demonstrating a WebGL app being updated at 144FPS from the serv…

To see this first hand try this website if you're in Europe (maybe it's also fast in the US, not sure): https://www.jpro.one/ ? The entire thing is a JavaFX app (i.e. desktop app), streaming DOM diffs to the browser to render its UI. Every click is processed server side (scrolling is client side). Yet it's actually one of the faster websites out there, at least for me. It looks and feels like a really fast and modern…

I'm not impressed. On mobile, the docs are completely broken and unreadable. Visiting a different docs subpage breaks the back button.

Firefox mobile seems to think the entire page is a link. This means I can't highlight text for instance.

Clicking on things feels sluggish. The responses are fast, but still perceptible. Do we really need a delay for opening a hamburger menu?

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

#93

Post by CharlieDigital »

sturza wrote: post #86

Local-first buys you instant UX by moving state to the client, and then makes everything else a little harder

    > instant UX
I do not get the hype. At all.

"Local first" and "instant UX" are the least of my concerns when it comes to project management. "Easy to find things" and "good visibility" are far more important. Such a weird thing to index on.

I might interact with the project management tool a few times a day. If I'm so frequently accessing it as an IC or an EM that "instant UX" becomes a selling point, then I'm doing something wrong with my day.

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

#94

Post by ben_w »

davey48016 wrote: post #79
ben_w wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. While I'm not even remotely excited by Jira (or any other PM software), I've never noticed it being that bad. Annoying? Absolutely! But not that painfully slow. Were some extras installed? Or is this one of those tools that needs a highly performant network?

I've seen on perm Jira at large companies get that slow. I'm not sure if it's the plugins or just the company being stingy on hardware.

I can easily believe either, but I am still curious what the failure mode(s) is (/are).

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

#95

Post by swsieber »

antgiant wrote: post #81

I’ve been working on a small browser app that is local first and have been trying to figure out how to pair it with static hosting. It feels like this should be possible but so far the tooling all seems stuck in the mindset of having a server somewhere. My use case is scoring live events that may or may not have Internet connection. So normal usage is a single person but sometimes it would be nice to allow for multi…

Honestly, having used InstantDB (one of the providers listed in their post), I think it'd be a pretty nice fit.

I've been writing a budget app for my wife and I and I've made it 100% free with 3rd party hosting:

* InstantDB free tier allows 1 dev. That's the remote sync.

* Netlify for the static hosting

* Free private gitlab ci/cd for running some email notification polling, basically a poor mans hosted cron.

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

#96

Post by recursion »

mike_hearn wrote: post #84
imiric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you are running some really complicated globally distributed backend your roundtrip will always be higher than 80ms for all users outside your immediate geographical area. The bottleneck is not the roundtrip time. It is the bloated and inefficient frontend frameworks, and the insane architectures built around them. Here's the creator of Datastar demonstrating a WebGL app being updated at 144FPS from the serv…

To see this first hand try this website if you're in Europe (maybe it's also fast in the US, not sure): https://www.jpro.one/ ? The entire thing is a JavaFX app (i.e. desktop app), streaming DOM diffs to the browser to render its UI. Every click is processed server side (scrolling is client side). Yet it's actually one of the faster websites out there, at least for me. It looks and feels like a really fast and modern…

At least for me this site is completely broken on mobile. I'm not saying it's not possible to write sites for mobile using this tech... But it's not a great advert at all.

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

#97

Post by icedchai »

ben_w wrote: post #75
o_m wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2018 I worked for a client that required we used Jira. It was so slow that the project manager set everything up in Excel during our planning meetings. After the meeting she would manually transfer it to Jira. She spent most of her time doing this. Each click in the interface took multiple seconds to respond, so it was impossible to get into a flow.

Hm. While I'm not even remotely excited by Jira (or any other PM software), I've never noticed it being that bad. Annoying? Absolutely! But not that painfully slow. Were some extras installed? Or is this one of those tools that needs a highly performant network?

The problem with Jira (and other tools) is it inevitably gets too many customizations: extra fields, plugins, mandatory workflows, etc. Instead of becoming a tool to manage work, it starts getting in the way of real work and becomes work itself.

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

#98

Post by swsieber »

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…

I think the current crop of sync engines greatly benefit from being web-first because they are still young and getting lots of updates. And mobile updates are a huge pain compared to webapp updates.

The PWA capabilities of webapps are pretty OK at this point. You can even drive notifications from the iOS pinned PWA apps, so personally, I get all I need from web apps pretending to be mobile apps.

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

#100

Post by mossTechnician »

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.

Hacker News comment sections are the only part of the internet that still feel "impossibly fast" to me. Even on Android, thousands of comments can scroll as fast as the OS permits, and the DOM is so simple that I've reopened day-old tabs to discover the page is still loaded. Even projects like Mastodon and Lemmy, which aren't beholden to modern web standards, have shifted to significant client-side scripting that lacks the finesse to appear performant.
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