It didn't work for me, and if you reading this, it probably won't work for you either.

It did­n’t work for me, and if you read­ing this, it prob­a­bly won’t work for you ei­ther.

Do Not Type Your Notes

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>Stacking PRs</h1>
I tried out GitHub’s PR stack­ing func­tion­al­ity for the ﬁrst time this week.
I have to say — it’s amaz­ing.
Instead of im­ple­ment­ing the en­tirety of <a href="./harper_for_windows">Harper Desktop’s Windows</a> sup­port in a sin­gle mas­sive PR (as I tend to do far too of­ten), I de­cided to sep­a­rate the work out into in­di­vid­ual PRs and stack them.
I am some­one who goes on a lot of tan­gents while work­ing.
While writ­ing a new mod­ule or crate, I of­ten ﬁnd my­self dis­cov­er­ing prob­lems with my pre­vi­ous work.
To get the new mod­ule to a place I am sat­is­ﬁed with, I will need to go back and make changes to some­thing seem­ingly un­re­lated in or­der to keep up a high bar of qual­ity.
Stacked PRs make this or­ga­ni­za­tion­ally pos­si­ble.
I can make my tan­gen­tial changes as a part of a sec­ond PR, ei­ther be­fore or af­ter the cur­rent one in the stack.
It’s re­ally nice, I sug­gest you give it a whirl.
Plus, the TUI for it is pretty slick.

I tried out GitHub's PR stacking functionality for the first time. It's amazing.

I tried out GitHub’s PR stack­ing func­tion­al­ity for the ﬁrst time. It’s amaz­ing.

Elijah Potter

Stacking PRs

Comments

Other Stuff

Do Not Type Your Notes

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale