#6 - Rasmus Andersson: Playbit, Software Quality, Data Models Tradeoffs

The guest of this episode is Rasmus Anderson, who helped to build many monumental products such as Spotify, Dropbox and Figma and is now working on Playbit, a local-first operating system built from scratch.
This extended conversation will go deep on software quality, the tradeoffs of different data models and the importance of the web for modern applications.
00:00 Intro
04:07 Spotify
06:26 Facebook, Dropbox & Figma
08:11 Why all those projects where local-first?
09:30 Data Models
20:36 The Swiss Army Knife Problem
24:29 The Web: A Love/Hate Relationship
28:02 What is Native?
40:41 Performance
51:02 Favorite Apps
56:38 Theory on Degrading App Quality over Time
01:02:12 Playbit: A Local-First OS
01:16:57 Local-First Data in Playbit
01:36:22 Passion and Finding Balance
01:42:48 Outro
Mentioned in podcast:
Rasmus Andersson: x.com/rsms + rsms.me
Playbit.it
Links:
Website: localfirst.fm
X/Twitter: x.com/localfirstfm
Local-First Conf 2024: www.localfirstconf.com
Thank you to expo.dev/ and crabnebula.dev/ for supporting the podcast

[@philmojii]

Love this conversation lots of interesting takes.

[@puneeification]

Anyone who manages to get an in depth interview with Rasmus deserves a subscription! Looking forward to the rest of your content and upcoming episodes!

[@AaronBoodman]

Rasmus, this was so inspiring. Thank you for sharing the vision for Playbit but also the bigger picture story for how it came to be. Johannes, thanks for providing the platform to hear these stories!

[@AaronBoodman]

PS - I'm very curious to see more information on the data model. I'm ... optimistically skeptical ... that the key/value and list primitives are really sufficient? But then you say you experienced their sufficiency in major apps. So, I'm on the edge of my seat to play with this when available.

[@tomaylott2593]

I’m going to need to rewatch this a few times and take better notes. I’ve always learned so much from Rsms. The glove vs woredrobe point feels like a VERY big deal. It’ll take a while to fully internalize that lesson. Thanks for sharing this interview!