Rewriting Pierre to be zero-latency

At Pierre, we recently transitioned from Supabase's REST API and realtime subscriptions to Replicache's local-first replication framework for our website. There is not a ton of writeups out there about how to actually move to local first, though. After wrestling with it a bit we think we got to a pretty good place technically and have definitely started to see the benefits in iteration speed.

This is a long article documenting how we implemented our client and server side of local-first. We hope it is helpful for anyone interested in local-first development generally or replicache specifically.

We explored several options for local-first development. "Local-first" means that most or all data is sent to and stored on the client in an IndexedDB database within the browser. The frontend then directly reads and writes this data, which is subsequently synced to the server. While numerous library options are available (such as ElectricSQL, RxDB, and many others emerging almost weekly), we ultimately chose Replicache.

Replicache is essentially a protocol for syncing data and a client library that stores this data in IndexedDB. The implementor is responsible for writing the backend, choosing the backend strategy, and implementing the mutations. Although this approach can be initially daunting, it offers the greatest flexibility—a quality we highly valued as we transitioned an existing codebase.

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