local first

Hi everyone,

Anton here.

I've spent 3 weeks in Warsaw recharging, celebrating my birthday and working on my health.

Last Saturday I came to Berlin and attended https://www.localfirstconf.com/ — it's a conference about making software work properly locally first, as opposed to being available only in the cloud on someone else's servers.

It's a good conference and I'd wanted to attend it for a while. But here are a few reflections of my own:

- Software has become (or maybe always was) very political. Which makes sense, because software engineers don't live in some isolated reality. A lot of the talks were about dangers:

  - the danger of more wars after russia attacked Ukraine

  - the danger of relying on a single country for something critical (whether russian gas, or cloud, or AI)

  - the danger of shifting moods in governments of countries that had been allies for decades

- It became really hard for me to listen to someone talk for 30 minutes. I don't think I enjoy that format much anymore. I only have the capacity for a few deep talks per year. For the rest, I want a 5-minute demo, or people showing me cool things they did. And if it's relevant, I'll come and find you!

If you're ever in NYC, I recommend this meetup: https://sideprojectsaturday.com/. It's my favorite thing out of all the social events I've been to in the past 10 years. Every Saturday you show up at 9AM, work on your own with the rest of the room, then you get 5 minutes to demo and show what you did or are curious about. And then you socialize a bit. This format suits me well and I love it. No slides, just people showing stuff they work on and are passionate about. And the diversity of people, projects and ideas is always inspiring.

A few things I've made since the last update:

- Wander - https://wander.md  -my own native macOS markdown editor that works with Obsidian vaults. An iOS version is coming next week too. It's on the App Store — currently it has the same features as all modern editors, but some interesting things are coming soon. I'll write another post about it.

- Quantified — I've almost finished my app that takes all my Strava (and Apple Health) data and joins and renders it nicely. For example, I have a nice map of all my runs in NYC over the years, and of the cities where I've done my runs and bike rides.

Anton