Anselm Eickhoff, creator of Jazz and founder of Garden Computing, delves into the revolutionary 'local-first' tech landscape. He discusses Jazz’s role in app development, emphasizing user trust and collaboration. The conversation showcases various innovative applications of Jazz, exploring challenges in data synchronization and user permissions. Anselm also reflects on the power of small teams in tech innovation, drawing parallels between jazz music and decentralized web ecosystems, while sharing insights from nature that echo the web’s evolution.
Jazz is a local-first web application framework that emphasizes user data storage on the client side, enhancing collaboration and user trust.
The framework simplifies the development process by integrating user identity and permission management directly within front-end code, reducing backend complexities.
Anselm Eickhoff envisions Garden Computing as a service that fosters local-first innovation, enabling developers to create meaningful applications rapidly and securely.
Deep dives
Introduction to Jazz and Local First Software
Jazz is presented as a framework designed for building web applications with a focus on local-first principles, which prioritize user data storage on the client's device while enabling seamless sharing and collaboration. Anselm Eickhoff, the creator of Jazz, shares his journey of developing a modern music app and how it led him to discover the limitations of traditional web app development that spurred the creation of Jazz. The framework allows developers to leverage their front-end coding skills to create applications that handle user identity, permissions, and data synchronization without requiring complex backend infrastructure. This approach addresses the pain points experienced by developers who frequently deal with repetitive tasks like user authentication and data sharing among users.
Key Features of Jazz
One of the standout features of Jazz is its inclusion of user identity and permission management as fundamental components, enabling developers to build collaborative applications more easily. This design choice simplifies the process of sharing state among users by incorporating a robust permissions system that can be managed directly within the front-end code. Additionally, Jazz offers a unique co-value data structure that allows developers to create collaborative data models in an intuitive manner, resembling standard JSON objects. The result is a developer experience that feels familiar and efficient, allowing for rapid application development without the overhead of traditional server-side setups.
Use Cases and Applications Built on Jazz
Various applications have been successfully built on Jazz, highlighting its versatility in addressing different needs across various domains. For instance, Invoice Radar, an app designed for freelancers to manage invoice collections, benefits significantly from its local-first architecture, which enhances user trust by running entirely on their devices. Another impressive use case is Learn Anything, a social learning community that pushes the boundaries of a local-first approach by allowing users to collaboratively curate resources while still functioning like a traditional social network. Jazz's flexibility accommodates both clearly defined local-first apps, as well as more complex applications requiring a nuanced understanding of roaming state and shared user experiences.
The Vision for Garden Computing
Garden Computing is established as a company dedicated to furthering the development of Jazz and creating sustainable infrastructure for local-first applications. The founder, Anselm, envisions Jazz not just as a framework but as a comprehensive service that simplifies the development process for small-to-medium-sized developers, enabling them to build robust apps rapidly while abstracting away the complexities involved in data persistence and syncing. With recent pre-seed funding, the company aims to expand its reach and enhance its offerings, emphasizing low-latency syncing and user privacy through encryption. This mission is driven by the belief that local-first development can lead to diverse applications, fostering an ecosystem of small giants rather than a few dominant players.
Embracing the Future of Web Development
Anselm expresses a positive outlook on the future of web development, appreciating the web's flexibility in accommodating new technologies and frameworks like Jazz. He emphasizes that instead of discarding what already exists, innovations should build upon the established web ecosystem, integrating new concepts like distributed state and local-first paradigms seamlessly. Moreover, Anselm recognizes the importance of user experience and developer engagement, stressing that technology adoption hinges on making tools feel familiar and accessible. Ultimately, his vision is to empower developers with solutions that facilitate the creation of meaningful applications for diverse user needs, reshaping the landscape of web development.
The guest of this episode is Anselm Eickhoff, creator of Jazz and founder of Garden Computing. This conversation will dive deep into Jazz to learn how it works and which use cases it’s a good fit for by exploring various apps already built on top of Jazz.