Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2025
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Rejoice! It's time once again for the OFFLine-FIRst SOftware
CHallenge. OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 marks the second ever installment of
this relatively new community event. If it's not really your cup
of tea, well, let this announcement perhaps also serve as your six
month advance warning for ROOPHLOCH 2025, which will begin on the
first of September.
To participate in OFFLFIRSOCH, you should develop and share during
the month of March a piece of software which could reasonably be
considered "offline-first". No attempt at a precise definition
of offline-first is offered. The idea is that we as a community
recognise it when we see it, and there's really no incentive to
attempt to bend the rules. Software which does not make any use
of networking whatsoever obviously qualifies, but network-aware
software may also do so, if it still retains the ability to be
genuinely useful even if connectivity is intermittent and infrequent.
There are no restrictions on what your software actually does,
what language it's written in, what platform it runs on or even
on the license it is released under. Just make it offline-first
and announce it in a post to your phlog and/or gemlog with an
(honest!) datestamp some time in March, and that's it. Email me
a link to the announcement post and I will compile a list to share
with everybody at the end of the month.
Despite the deliberate lack of restrictions on what your
offline-first software actually does, the intended "spirit" of
OFFLFIRSOCH is to be an act of...well, it sounds a bit grandiose,
but resistance, or defiance, or at least some kind of expression
of discontent at the fact that modern computing devices have
more processing power and storage space than ever before, but are
increasingly used as dumb clients for accessing online services,
services which we have little to no control over or reasonable
expectation of longevity from. Reaching out to random servers run
by who-knows-who, to who-knows-what end, servers which need to be
kept online 24/7/365, consuming electricity and emitting heat, in
order to solve trivial computational tasks like unit conversions,
timezone conversions, or generating a random password is an obviously
absurd practice which most of us engage in with increasing frequency
because somehow we've ended up in a world where this is the path
of least resistance. OFFLFIRSOCH is an opportunity to reflect on
tasks you routinely solve using the internet which can obviously
be solved well enough without using the internet, and to build
yourself the tools to make that possible.
If you need a little further inspiration, feel free to peruse the
list of last year's entries[1].
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/offlfirsoch/2024
