<h1>Why I Talk to Myself</h1>
<img src="/images/bike_sidewalk.webp" alt="My bike broke down. Luckily, I had my camera">
Each week I sit down and re­ﬂect on what I’ve learned. I think about which of my ef­forts have helped the Harper en­deavor, and which have harmed it. It’s not easy, but I think it’s one of the best habits I’ve built. More ac­cu­rately, it’s one of the best habits <a href="https://ma.tt">Matt</a> has en­cour­aged me to build.
When I re­ally think about it, I’m re­minded of the orig­i­nal <a href="https://blog.afterthedeadline.com/">After the Deadline blog</a>, which co­in­ci­den­tally also had a cat­e­gory called “Talking to Myself”. I won­der if Raphael Mudge (AtD’s au­thor) had a sim­i­lar mo­ti­va­tion.
I talk to my­self to ﬁnd the weak­nesses in Harper’s mis­sion and fo­cus my at­ten­tion on what mat­ters. It is an ef­ﬁ­cient way to get from <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/05/sharing-levels/">layer one to layer ﬁve</a>. It can help get other main­tain­ers on the same page and build a body of knowl­edge that can be linked to from any­where.
Not wor­ry­ing about keep­ing in­for­ma­tion locked-down is one of the more beau­ti­ful parts of work­ing in pub­lic. Open source code would be noth­ing with­out sim­i­larly open source knowl­edge. I talk to my­self on­line so my users can un­der­stand my in­ten­tions.
In many senses, we are not un­like moths. We are drawn to the lights of dis­trac­tion, hype, and pro­cras­ti­na­tion. For me, set­ting up check­points to stop and re­ﬂect has been an ef­fec­tive de­ter­rent from these lights. In fact, I think each minute for which I stop and think has paid it­self back three times over in time sav­ings. If I can bet­ter al­lo­cate my time and en­ergy, I can avoid do­ing re­dun­dant work pur­su­ing point­less goals.
<h2>Bonus Points</h2>
A <a href="./markov_chains_are_the_original_language_models">few</a> of my <a href="./local-first_software_is_easier_to_scale">ar­ti­cles</a> have be­come pop­u­lar on sites like Hacker News and Reddit. We’ve got­ten quite a few Harper in­stal­la­tions from links on these ar­ti­cles. I would never rely on this kind of blog­ging as a source of ad­ver­tis­ing, but it is nice to see it help spread the word.

It's not easy, but I think it's one of the best habits I've ever built.

It’s not easy, but I think it’s one of the best habits I’ve ever built.

Why I Talk to Myself

Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.

Back in my day, we used math for au­to­com­plete.

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

<h1>Local-First Software is Easier to Scale</h1>
<img src="/images/flatirons.webp" alt="The Flatirons">
The ti­tle of this post is some­what mis­lead­ing. Local-ﬁrst soft­ware rarely needs to be scaled at all.
<a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a> re­cently re­ceived a mas­sive in­crease in both traf­ﬁc and user count.
How?
By mak­ing it to the front page of Hacker News.
If you could­n’t tell by the ex­tent to which I talk about this, I’m thrilled.
This amounted to a tremen­dous amount of free ad­ver­tis­ing, if noth­ing else.
I’ve been think­ing a lot about the won­drous ben­e­ﬁts of work­ing at the edge.
That’s just one term of many that peo­ple use to de­scribe Harper: “edge-ﬁrst”.
Others in­clude “local-ﬁrst” or sim­ply “on-device”.
They are all just jar­gon for a sim­ple idea: We run all the rel­e­vant gram­mar check­ing code as phys­i­cally close to the users as pos­si­ble.
That way, we can serve up sug­ges­tions faster than any­one else.
To achieve our goal, we make sure that every­thing is well-op­ti­mized and lean.
Harper barely uses any CPU or mem­ory at all.
What does all this mean in the con­text of the re­cent uptick in user ac­qui­si­tion? Imagine, for a mo­ment, we are LanguageTool.
Our soft­ware is writ­ten in Java, with ques­tion­able at­ten­dance to the ef­ﬁ­ciency of our code.
Since our soft­ware re­quires a big server to run, we have a cer­tain num­ber of servers on standby to han­dle a cer­tain amount of ex­pected load.
If sud­denly the num­ber of re­quests we re­ceived were to dou­ble (as it did for the Chrome ex­ten­sion), we would be big trou­ble.
To avoid in­creas­ing the la­tency on re­quests (or drop­ping re­quests all to­gether), we would need to scale up the num­ber of run­ning servers.
This not only takes hir­ing an ex­pert in cloud ar­chi­tec­ture, but also ad­di­tional fund­ing to pay the AWS (or what­ever) bill at the end of the month.
Because Harper runs at the edge (no server re­quired), we don’t have to worry about that.
In fact, I only no­ticed that our user count had spiked af­ter I vis­ited Hacker News the morn­ing af­ter.
No hic­cups at all.
Lots of cloud providers like to brag about be­ing able to scale with their users. I like to brag about not hav­ing to scale at all.

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.

The ti­tle of this post is some­what mis­lead­ing. Local-ﬁrst soft­ware rarely needs to be scaled at all.

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

<h1>Harper in the News</h1>
The biggest com­plaint about Harper is that the qual­ity of gram­mar check­ing still needs some work.
I’ve got an ex­cit­ing new pro­ject I’m prepar­ing to dis­cuss later this week (hopefully) in that area.
It should be a step-func­tion im­prove­ment over our pre­vi­ous meth­ods for cre­at­ing new rules.
In the mean­time, I’ve col­lected some re­cent sight­ings of Harper in the wild:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://obsidian.rocks/resource-harper/">Obsidian Rocks</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.wearefounders.uk/the-grammar-checker-that-actually-gets-developers-meet-harper/">We Are Founders</a></li>
<li><a href="https://itsfoss.com/harper-grammar-checker/">It’s FOSS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/ditched-grammarly-for-this-amazing-open-source-alternative/">XDA Developers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.maketecheasier.com/harper-vs-grammarly/">Make Tech Easier</a></li>
</ul>

I've got some exciting new work I'm preparing to discuss later this week (hopefully). In the meantime, I've collected some recent sightings of Harper in the wild.

I’ve got some ex­cit­ing new work I’m prepar­ing to dis­cuss later this week (hopefully). In the mean­time, I’ve col­lected some re­cent sight­ings of Harper in the wild.

Elijah Potter

Harper in the News

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Other Stuff

Why I Talk to Myself

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale