Sam Willis

My favorite type of conference — 1 day, single track with a ton of great folks to chat with

I've got my ticket! Who else is going to @syncconf.bsky.social?

Really looking forward to Sync Conf! We are at an epoch moment with AI, everything is changing, and the abstractions we build on are chaining to enable it. Sync is that abstraction, and this conference is going to be one that is remembered as instrumental.

Announcing Sync Conf 2025. Join us in SF on Nov 12th.

We've just delivered a 100x write performance bump with our latest release of Electric. How? We threw away our storage engine and built a new one designed for sync 🧵 electric-sql.com/blog/2025/08...

Agentic AI, beneath all the hype, is actually just normal software. You can build agentic systems with a database, standard web tooling and real-time sync.

You can just write to a database

Dev tools coming soon to @tanstack.com DB! The best client side state libs have brilliant dev tools, this is even more important for DB as you store so much state in it. The DB dev tools will give you full visibility of all collections and live queries. 🚀🎉

ElectricSQL recently completed a 120-day reliability sprint. Our one goal: make our sync engine so boring-reliable you stop thinking about it and just build. We chased every incident, fixed every user-reported bug, and made unglamorous work our priority. 🧵

Very excited to have reached the Beta milestone with @tanstack.com DB 🚀🎉 It’s been a privilege to work with @tannerlinsley.com and the team on building this, absolute rock stars!

🎉 TanStack DB now has @solidjs.com support!

TanStack DB now has @svelte.dev support!

PGlite (WASM Postgres) now gets over 1 million downloads a week! 🤯🚀 Absolutely incredible to see how people have embraced what we have built. Awesome work by the team!

PGlite (WASM Postgres) now gets over 1 million downloads a week! 🤯🚀 Absolutely incredible to see how people have embraced what we have built. Awesome work by the team!

Home for the next few weeks 😁 Love the 🏔️ in the summer!

Really looking forward to Sync London tomorrow! A bunch of exciting talks from teams building real apps on sync engines 🚀🥳

Not long now! lu.ma/sync-london Talks are shaping up great and we’re well past venue capacity. @yonz.bsky.social is airborne. @samwillis.uk has sorted out the pineapple cubes and cocktail sausages. If you’re in London on Tuesday and have been lurking so far, now’s your last chance!

This is an incredibly niche take, even for my corner over here. It goes further, the iterate method computing a fixed point is referenced as "Limbo" in Inception. IYKYN 😂

Christopher Nolan's Inception is actually an allegory for Differential Dataflow 🤯 - Multidimensional Versioning = Nested Dream Timelines: as you iterate / move down you make a new timeline - Frontiers = Kick Timing: a reference point across all dimensions

I'm speaking about syncing Postgres into the client with @electric-sql.com at the SF Bay Area Postgres users groups tomorrow (Tuesday 10th June). Online from noon local time, live stream here: www.meetup.com/postgresql-1...

Last month I spoke @pgconf.dev about @pglite.dev, how we built it and where we plan to take it 🎉 You can now watch my talk at the link below 🚀🐘

🧵 More play less infra => vibe coding with the database inside the sandbox. Apps built with AI app builders like @bolt.new usually need to connect to a database to actually work. With @pglite.dev you can have the database inside the sandbox, so you can vibe code without even thinking about infra.

At @localfirstconf.com last week @thruflo.com introduced @tanstack.com DB and how it enables you to incrementally adopt Sync to make your apps faster and give you users a better experience.

When you're vibe-coding, you don't want to think about infra. You want to stay in the zone, iterating and expressing yourself. That means having a database inside your sandbox. No glue, no friction, no external services, no free-tier limits. Forkable, disposable, unlimited and zero cost.

PGlite can now be used with any Postgres client, and pairs perfectly with AI app builders for vibe coding. Love that with @bolt.new *everything* runs in the browser - node, the dev server, and now even PGlite 🚀🤯 Awesome job by the team to get this out!

What to chat sync engines and how they can help you make better apps, particularly AI apps? We're hosting Sync London on July 1st, do sign up and come along. It will be a great evening! I'll be there ready to chat about @electric-sql.com, @pglite.dev and @tanstack.com DB.

For any North American folks having FOMO about @localfirstconf.com, there’s a new conference on sync engines as app architecture! SF in November syncconf.dev

Really looking forward to @localfirstconf.com tomorrow. The world of software has changed more than we could have imagined since the conf a year ago. I'm excited to hear how everyone is thinking about local first software in this new AI world. 🚀🤖

GenAI enables me to try so many more of my ideas, even tools just for myself. It's also why local-first software is going to be massive - paired with AI code gen, anyone can build an app for themselves with no infra. Will be hot topic at @localfirstconf.com

Who's going to @localfirstconf.com next week? Super excited to be heading back to Berlin for it 🇩🇪 Loved the trip last year!

Who's going to @localfirstconf.com next week? Super excited to be heading back to Berlin for it 🇩🇪 Loved the trip last year!

No docker required. Postgres built into the Prisma dev environment using @pglite.dev

A reactive client store built on differential dataflow. With optimistic mutators and sub-millisecond live queries. This is the missing piece of the jigsaw for modern app dev.

This has been *super* fun to work on this the past few months w/ @samwillis.uk & @thruflo.com & @tannerlinsley.com It's really fun to think through from scratch a huge problem space (managing state!) and come up with a fairly novel solution.

Announcing TanStack/DB 🎉🥳 A lightweight, reactive, mini-database with IVM that is perfect for both Sync and Fetch. It’s been a lot of fun to build this with @kyle.bricolage.io + @thruflo.com, and collaborate with @tannerlinsley.com. We are incredibly excited for where this can go!

On my way to @pgconf.dev, and shipping code from 35k feet in the air 😉✈️ Exciting things coming!

My colleague @balegas.bsky.social has created an awesome @electric-sql.com integration with the awesome Yjs CRDT toolkit. Sync your edits to a Ydoc via Electric 🚀 Perfect for integration with ProseMirror or TipTap for collaborative rich text editing!

Getting notified of AirPods/Tags traveling with you is smart - I like it. But it's absurd that you can't click a button that says "these are my wife's, they will often travel with me, I don't need to know this!" - or rather "ignore forever"

Important question, where is the Poutine in Montreal? 😋

One week till my talk @pgconf.dev! Very excited to be visiting Montreal 🇨🇦 Give me a shout if you want to meet up a chat @pglite.dev, @electric-sql.com, Sync Engines or Local-first app development.

Just ran into a funny test bug w/ my english colleague @samwillis.uk — his test with getDate worked because he lives in GMT but broke for me. #britishTimePrivilege 😂

Sunday mornings are for family reading-in-a-coffe-shop sessions 📚

Got to enjoy the British summer while it's actually happening... Moving my office to the garden for the week.

I wander how far off we were from GenAI tools preempting us and proactively doing work? I want to get back from a w/e and find that a tool has continued the work I was doing, all set for review. I want it to have the agency to just know what to work on.

PGlite is now based on Postgres 17 🎉🚀 v0.3, which we just released, is a big step forward for the project, and the foundation for a lot of exciting things coming soon!

LLMs are generating code. That code is imperatively fetching data. That leads to a big ball of spaghetti. Here's how to untangle it: electric-sql.com/blog/2025/04...

We’re excited to announce @thruflo.com co-founder of @electric-sql.com will be speaking at the local-first conf 2025.

Really awesome post by @chris.blue on incremental view maintenance. It's traditionally been thought of as something for analytics workflows, but combined with a sync engine it can bring efficient updates to your UI where standard queries were the norm!