Discover the art of building offline-first applications that function even in the face of unreliable or nonexistent network connections. In this session, explore how popular apps like WhatsApp, Figma, and Linear elevate their user experience and facilitate seamless collaboration by harnessing the power of offline-first techniques. Additionally, delve into common challenges and effective solutions, such as optimistic concurrency and conflict resolution, ensuring your applications remain resilient and user-friendly in any network environment.

Interview:

What's the focus of your work these days?

My focus these days is on building data infrastructure that enables the development of edge-first or local-first software. I recently joined Amplify Partners as an EIR (entrepreneur in residence) to pursue my goal of starting my own company, following a decade spent at SingleStore developing a high-performance distributed relational database.

What's the motivation for your talk at QCon New York 2023?

The motivation for my talk is to highlight the benefits of offline-first applications for human-in-the-loop applications, and to inspire more people to consider offline-first, local-first, or edge-first architectures. I want to showcase some of these applications to demonstrate their potential for improving user experience.

How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?

The target audience for my talk is software engineers who work on human-in-the-loop applications, and the presentation is suitable for beginners to advanced attendees who are interested in these applications.

Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?

I hope that people will leave the presentation inspired to learn more and potentially incorporate local-first techniques when building their next application.

Speaker

Carl Sverre

Entrepreneur in Residence @Amplify Partners

Carl is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Amplify Partners. He is currently working on a stealth company focused on edge computing and application state management. He believes that data should be able to move to where it's needed and be unlocked from cloud providers all while maintaining correctness and keeping costs low. Ultimately, applications should be able to easily operate within an "offline-first" and "local-first" context.

Prior to joining Amplify Partners, Carl spent a decade at SingleStore (fka MemSQL) where he held various roles, including Director of Engineering and Senior Director of the company’s incubation lab. During his tenure at SingleStore, Carl worked on a wide range of projects including: streaming systems, Wasm extensibility, managed services, real time dashboards, large scale testing infrastructure, and deep Spark integrations. He also co-invented SingleStore's real-time data retrieval patent.

Prior to SingleStore, Carl was an intern and early engineer at Mixpanel where he worked on many features including segmentation, funnel analysis, and events. At Mixpanel, Carl had an early taste of big data analytics and the capabilities of the web platform to support complex applications.