All of the Local-First Conf 2026 videos are published now, so it’s a great moment to share some reflections from the annual event.
First, it’s always a joy to see everyone together. Every year, we see new faces and old friends connecting, catching one another up on their work from the year before, and swapping stories. This event has always been a big-tent community; it’s one that brings together folks from research, open-source, fledgling start-ups and big companies. What unites everyone is a shared set of values more than any technology: we aspire to a world where individual people have more control over their computing lives… and we would like our computers to keep working even with the wi-fi off.
The whole playlist from the two-day main event is full of brilliant presentations. I’m going to single out two talks from folks outside the lab. Rachel-Lee Nabors’ extremely pragmatic talk on how to select a suitable local LLM was a perfect distillation of specific and hard-earned knowledge. Scott Jenson’s talk on our collective need to evolve Desktop UX was brilliant for the opposite reasons: it was a wide-ranging talk that left me feeling inspired and eager to explore.
Thanks to Florian Wagner for photographing Local First Conf and Lab Day.
The big change for me and the rest of the Ink & Switch team was the addition of a third “Lab Day” to the conference. Not quite an unconference, and not quite a festival, but with elements of both. We had lots of little sessions, some great friends came out and shared their work, and folks made their own custom Ink & Switch notebooks (a tradition we’ve long held at our team meetings). Researchers working on our Programmable Ink track held live and interactive sessions to give folks a chance to try out our rarely-revealed prototypes. With help from a big robotic knitting machine maintained by a Berlin collective, Agnes Cameron taught people how computational knitting really works.
I’m writing this note inside of Patchwork, our local-first malleable software system. We gave a massive talk with half a dozen people on stage presenting it. Even the edited video runs 10m over time (sorry). It’s the first time we’ve shown people all of the incredible work we’ve been building with the funding we’ve put to work from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
Ivy Reese introduced the world to PlayBook, a long-running project from the Programmable Ink research track seeking to build a programmable notebook. She explained our love of notebooks, and shared how the Programmable Ink team’s approach to building software in terms of “materials” has produced a provocative ink canvas that differs from prior art.
Finally (though chronologically first) I gave a talk about our approach to research and how we believe that research can be an act of service to a community. This year has been our tenth year working as an independent lab, and although our work and approach are always evolving, I wanted to share some of the things we’ve learned along the way.
Alright, that’s it! Subscribe to the Local First Conf newsletter to be among the first to hear about future events. Go enjoy all the talks, and if you are a person who watches videos on 2x remember: I sound much slower in person.
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