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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
alfierrc LinkCurrently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell, about a third of the way through. I knew little about Thomas Cromwell before starting it and am very much enjoying the rich layers of history and...Currently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell, about a third of the way through. I knew little about Thomas Cromwell before starting it and am very much enjoying the rich layers of history and character study. However, the writing style is very unique, and I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by it, though I do think it’s growing on me. People complain most often about the “he” thing. For the those who haven’t read, Mantell uses the pronoun “he” relentlessly, where it would be much more natural and useful to use the character in questions name. However once you understand that all ambiguous “he’s” likely refer to Cromwell himself, the problem is more or less solved, and you can begin to appreciate the voyeuristic intimate tone they help to convey. It is also written in the present tense which I tend to find quite jarring, and has a tempo can sometimes feel erratic as we jump between scenes from sentence to sentence. And yet, it works. I think this is because it is done with total intentionality and confidence. Mantell knows what she’s doing and honestly I’m enjoying the ride.
I’m currently working on a local-first, bookmarking, archive, catch all, thing. It’s an Electron app + a browser extension designed to be a single, reliable solution for saving anything I find online, since I work across a few different computers and operating systems.
The extension automatically detects what you're saving and scrapes accordingly. It can grab any image, products with their price and images, save articles in a clean reader format to read later in the app, and capture entire webpages as full-page screenshots. Everything gets saved directly to a folder on my own machine as standard markdown and image files. This means all the data is fully accessible and editable from outside of the app, no proprietary lock-in. It also means you can add notes and local files to use in the app by simply moving it to that folder. I’ve quite a lot more features planned but really want to nail the frictionless capture side of things first.
Which leads me to the main challenge I'm wrestling with now: the path to mobile access and sync. Currently I see a few options:
The purist approach is to remain fully local, which would mean building a native mobile app and handling sync with CRDT (ideal) or third party cloud services (easier). However, as someone with no mobile dev experience I worry this could add a chunk of time to the project, perhaps worth it though. This has led me to consider:
a companion web app, which would sync all the local
files to its database periodically and be far more convenient to build and access. However this would perhaps undermine the whole "local-first" philosophy. Finally:
A potential middle ground is to offer a self-hosted option, which aligns with the user-sovereignty ethos while achieving the convenience of a webapp. I’m big into self hosting so this is an enticing option, but I would like to make it publicly available at some point and worry this would introduce a higher technical barrier for entry.
Curious to hear if others have faced any similar quandaries in their own projects.