126: James Long - Building Distributed Local-First JavaScript Applications

In this episode of Fullstack Radio I talked to James Long about building Actual, a distributed local first JavaScript application with no central database. This is Fullstack Radio episode one twenty six. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wavin. And today, it's my pleasure to be speaking with James Long, who you are probably most familiar as the creator of Prettier, which is a tool that's sort of taken the web by storm at this point. I think, basically, everyone is using it. I can't really remember what it was like to have to think about formatting files. Now I just, like, type stuff, the code goes wherever it wants on the screen, and command s, alright, everything's cleaned up again. But today, what I wanted to talk to you about, James, is not Prettier because, you've probably talked about prettier to death at this point, but I wanted to dig into this new application you're working on, this new, kind of software business you're building called actual, which is a tool for helping people sort of manage their personal budgets and stuff like that. So the thing I was most excited to talk to you about is sort of the way that you've decided to approach building this app, which I think is a bit different from how a lot of people working on the web would have approached, building something, and that is that you're building this app, I believe it's like an electron app currently, but the whole thing is designed to, like, not require network access at all. Is that right? Yes. So it started as a desktop application, and so it kind of started from just the typical local app, which, you know, is that's not really innovative at all by itself. It's just a local app, and then it grew into this thing where I was like, oh, crap. I need a mobile app, which means crap I need to sync them somehow and then it just sort of, I kind of fell into it in a way. But yeah I have always loved the honestly I've always loved like local desktop apps they're just like super fast they're always there and then so I was kind of bending over backwards to try to keep that experience but still have kind of the capabilities of what the web offers and so I kind of took a lot of like several years of just kind of learning and prototyping, and I've kind of fell into this interesting pattern. So I kind of came at it from a different angle. Yeah. So I think it'd be cool to sort of dig into that and learn more about, like, what that even means and how other people can kind of use some of these ideas to sort of build something like this themselves. So I guess maybe like the first place, to start coming at this as someone …