I was at the LocalFirstConf last week. It was Amazing!

The excitement and the passion about the technologies and tools that people presented was quite palpable. I was knew there, but a lot of people seemed to know each other from previous years or online.

I didn’t know this but this was the first year that At-proto community also came around with the LocalFirst and it was a very nice amalgamation of both, I would.

It was my introduction to topics like sync engines and tools like iroh, and auto-merge and all the other very interesting unreleased software that Ink & Switch is working on.

One of the highlights of this conference for me was the un-conference day as they called it, where there were a few workshops, smaller intros and a more social time than otherwise. This is where I got introduced to the fascinating world of textile engineering coding, machines that have hundreds of kneedles and can be programmed to create patterns and shapes from code. It was wonderful! My picture of the week comes from there.

Another topic in this conference, as with everything these days, was AI. But specifically privacy and ownership with it. Therefore, there were a few talks either showcasing an Local-AI-in-a-box tool, talking about what a local AI setup can look like and need, or founders of earendil (where pi agents comes from), talking about the future of AI in Europe.

While the focus of talks was local AI, it is pretty obvious that the transition or even proliferation will take some time as everyone I saw with a laptop open had claude code running on it.

Book I want to read

The Winter of the Witch, by Katherine Arden

The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden | Goodreads

Following their adventures in The Bear and the Nighting…

This is the third book in the Winternight trilogy and I still haven’t finished the second one, but I am looking forward to reading this.

Interesting reads and watches

This is a very tech heavy reads week. Mostly discoveries from the conference

1. Malleable Software
   As they say, the goal here is to be a food for thought and pushing people towards being more thoughtful while creating software. This article does it very well.

2. Road to Tonk Substrate
   Thoughts on a local first database

A project I discovered

The "file over app" philosophy for calendars.

Caldir - your calendar as a directory

Your calendar as a directory

A photo I took

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you next week!