The latest articles on DEV Community by Charlie Fisher (@charlie_tinkers). https://dev.to/charlie_tinkers https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4210606%2Fe2733e9b-4156-4652-b5bf-46c4e2edade8.jpg https://dev.to/charlie_tinkers en Charlie Fisher Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:41:48 +0000 https://dev.to/charlie_tinkers/the-offline-first-decision-i-put-off-for-a-year-15ij https://dev.to/charlie_tinkers/the-offline-first-decision-i-put-off-for-a-year-15ij <p>For a year I told myself my Flutter app didn't need offline support. Then I spent a week in a place with terrible signal and realized how much of the app was pointless without a network.</p> <p>Adding offline-first after the fact is much harder than starting with it. What I'd do differently:</p> <ul> <li>Model every write as an operation that can be queued</li> <li>Give every entity a local id and a server id</li> <li>Decide the conflict rule <em>before</em> writing sync code</li> </ul> <p>We went with "last write wins per field" and it's been fine for our use case, but I regret not writing down the rule earlier.</p> <p>I'm learning Zig on the side, mostly out of curiosity about low-level memory. It's a very different world from Dart, and that's the point.</p> flutter mobile sync