Local-first aims to empower users. But it also does something more systemic: it improves systems' resilience against things going wrong. In a world where geopolitical tensions are increasing and long-standing certainties are upended, decentralisation and resilience become increasingly important. This talk explores why local-first software is moving from a personal nice-to-have to a strategic must-have, and what this means for our community.

We’ll discuss some of the challenges and features associated with agentic architecture that leverages both cloud infra and local machines. This spans our work with Pi and Lefos.

The "Local First" ethos is about more than storing data on-device; it's about increasing user agency in all forms of computing. Atproto is for high scale open networking. This talk will cover how we solved the scale problems, and how we think its infrastructure can give a leg up to much smaller privacy-oriented computing tasks.

When you save a document, you should be able to open and edit your documents with any compatible program. Past versions. Future versions. Software written in house, and software written by strangers on the other side of the world.

How do we make our programs do that?

In this talk, I'll lay out the challenge in front of us. How do we make a file format which can grow and change over time, without coordination between developers? How do we make programs today which can open files that won't be created for 10 or 100 years, sporting features that haven't been invented yet? It sounds impossible. Yet Email and HTML have quietly managed it for decades.

I think we can solve this problem. Let's get the creative juices flowing.