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Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

From the perspective of someone less familiar with this kind of thing, this comparison would be easier to understand with a bit of an introductory explanation about what job we're trying to do or problem we're trying to solve, and the assumed context or constraints.

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The key piece of missing info is this is about web development. Some web devs don't seem to know that there are other engineers out there who don't work in web dev. More specifically, we're talking about frontend web dev, which means writing code that runs in a web browser. Browsers traditionally are stateless and get all their data from a server. Any frontend code would also need to communicate with some backend if it wants to store any persistent state. But that requires an internet connection. Nowadays browsers have some ability to store persistent state themselves so this is about supporting code that works offline, ie. without a connection to the backend.

Offline-first is a well-known term. You can search for it elsewhere. When writing, it's important to choose who you're speaking to exactly so that you can avoid sharing context, since that takes up time and bandwidth. The truth is, communication is much more efficient if you don't re-explain every single concept that you are talking about.

leaving aside the definition of "offline first", it'd be clearer to understand if the there was a brief problem statement pinning down that yes, we're specifically investigating offline first databases that are easy to integrate with javascript apps -- or perhaps comparisons of other offline first approaches for native mobile apps or whatnot would make sense and be welcome.

naive question: arguably git and mercurial and subversion could be thought of as offline first databases -- albeit targeted at a domain-specific use case. does it make any sense to compare them too?

academia has many things to learn from the world of software development, particularly around testing to ensure quality and reproducibility of work, but perhaps software development could benefit from a few ideas from academia: giving a brief introduction to contextualise the work -- not an extensive glosarry, but at least a few links to relevant work others have already done - ideally with at least one link to something that introduced the idea or is an extensive survey of the subject.

I'm reading the book "designing data-intensive applications" at the moment and looked up offline-first applications in the index, which references http://blog.hood.ie/2013/11/say-hello-to-offline-first/ , which no longer exists, but is still mirrored by https://web.archive.org/web/20200222150347/http://hood.ie/bl...

A compromise solution would be linking to a glossary or introductory material if someone is generally versed but not in a particular subject, we get a lot of, say, pure math people on here who find software engineering interesting.

you'd still have to draw a line at some point which terms you'd explain as otherwise your article only consist of glossary information.

i'm pretty sure the term offline-first wouldn't have met the cutoff point, as its _really_ well known from my experience.

I wrote so much things and posted it on HN over the years. There is just no way to make everyone happy, someone always complains that some infos are missing or too much.

I now leave things out that can be googled and are already known by "most" readers.

This has drastically improved my writing too. It's ok to target a specific group of people when writing. Writing for the lowest common denominator hurts everyone sometimes - it might be too high level for beginners, but too much background info for experts.

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