Johannes Schickling

Johannes Schickling

@schickling.dev

Building a local-first music app overtone.pro with @livestore.dev. Host @localfirst.fm. DX Effect. Founded @prisma.io. schickling.dev

4.4K followers278 following432 posts

I finally built my own self-driving, personal CRM. After many failed attempts and trying a lot different tools/products, I finally ended up with a system/approach I like built on top of Notion. The best part: It auto-updates, so data never goes stale.

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Hopefully this is useful inspiration/guidance for folks who are thinking about building their own CRM. Curious to hear your feedback/thoughts and happy to answer questions!

I finally built my own self-driving, personal CRM. After many failed attempts and trying a lot different tools/products, I finally ended up with a system/approach I like built on top of Notion. The best part: It auto-updates, so data never goes stale.

I've been using my custom CRM for a few months now, and it's been working really well for me. The key unlock is to let agents automatically maintain, so data never goes stale again.

I’ve been building my own software factory over the past year. It again changed the way how I do software engineering fundamentally - similar delta compared to coding by hand vs using agents. I’m thinking of writing a blog post about it. What are your biggest questions?

Incredible speaker lineup for this year’s Local-First Conf. Can't wait for the event next month. Also I think we only have ~10 tickets left, so now's probably your last chance to get one. 👀

Local-First Conf@localfirstconf.com

We're thrilled to announce our next speaker batch for Local-First Conf 2026.

I'm slowly but surely forming a better idea how to do "better specs". The key idea is to make them structured and allowing a spec to contain structured source of truth definitions and rich artifacts such as code-defined diagrams, API/CLI/schema definitions, etc.

This could look something like "literate TypeScript". A mixture of TypeScript, Markdown and React. Think Jupyter Notebooks but modern and embracing web technologies. Still early days but I'm already working towards this spec-driven vision.

Local-First Conf was a massive success the last 2 years but it feels like the world of software has fundamentally changed by now. That's why I'm incredibly excited that this year's conference puts a focus on how AI and local-first software go hand in hand. See you in Berlin!

Local-First Conf@localfirstconf.com

Tickets for Local-First Conf 2026 are now on sale July 12–14 · Berlin · 300 people · single track Theme: user empowerment in an age of fluid software. We're going beyond CRDTs and sync. If you're building for user agency, this is your conference. Tickets live now → localfirstconf.com

Johannes Schickling reposted

LiveStore Hands-on #1: Work Squared Friday, Sept 26 @ 5pm CEST / 11am ET (tomorrow) Watch @schickling and @jessmartin hands-on with a real LiveStore app: ▪︎ Architecture review ▪︎ LiveStore best practices ▪︎ Live debugging ▪︎︎ Source available luma.com/4s7qev78

luma.comLiveStore Hands-on #1: Work Squared · LumaReal-time code review of Work Squared built on LiveStore. Framework creator Johannes pairs with app author Jess to debug, refactor, and share best practices.

The era of manual software development is coming to a close quickly. My view on software development has drastically changed. I believe in the future the role of engineers will be to build software factories, not the software itself.

So far programmers have been manual factory workers now quickly being replaced by more efficient and better robots. Like it or not. That’s what’s already happening. Embrace change.

Had a great time interviewing David about how MasterClass uses Effect to build a state-of-the-art voice AI system. Really shows the power of Effect streams.

In this Cause & Effect episode, Johannes Schickling talks with David Golightly about how MasterClass built Cortex with Effect. Cortex is the voice AI orchestration layer powering personalized conversations with celebrity instructors like Gordon Ramsay and Mark Cuban. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2bU...

Johannes Schickling reposted

🧠 Ever heard of event sourcing? It’s the idea of storing every change as a series of events — instead of just keeping the current state. Think of it like git, but for your app’s data.

Ditto is probably the most mature sync engine out there used in airlines and other critical environments. Loved this conversation with Adam who’s the founder of Ditto and previously built Realm. Lots of great stories and insights in this episode!

localfirst.fm@localfirst.fm

Episode #26 is out. Adam Fish on building sync engines at scale with Ditto and Realm. Full episode links and show notes in the comments.

Looking for an experienced frontend developer for a very interesting contract project (related to AI and LiveStore). Please get in touch via DM with references. (Ideally minimum of 5 years of experience.) Referrals welcome!

Johannes Schickling reposted

LiveStore is currently trending on GitHub and has already crossed 1000 stars since open sourcing this week! ⭐

After 4 years of work, I'm incredibly excited to introduce LiveStore, the next-gen data layer I'm building for Overtone. It's based on reactive SQLite and has a built-in sync engine. Give it a try - would love your feedback!

When I founded Prisma, my goal was to make databases easy. Now building @livestore.dev, my goal is to make app data simple. Easy is great, particularly when getting started. But as an app gets complex, simplicity is more important. (Even more true with AI.)

Investing in good debugging practices is one of the highest leverage things you can do as an engineer. Particularly with more AI tooling and/or code written by AI. Just to name a few: - Step debugging (in VSC/Browser) - Structured logging (aiming for high signal) - OpenTelemetry

I didn't not expect that building the devtools messaging protocol for @livestore.dev would turn out to be one of the most difficult parts to build. In order to support reliable and efficient messaging (supporting transferables), I ended up building a local networking protocol called "Webmesh".

After more than 6 months of working on the local-first landscape resource together with @jessmart.in, we're getting very close to launching it. We already included many local-first/sync technologies but now is still a great time to be included. Reach out!

Johannes Schickling@schickling.dev

To provide some guidance and orientation to developers new to the local-first ecosystem, I'm planning to work on a in-depth comparison resource. Stay tuned! This will take a lot of effort but luckily some local-first vendors have already offered to support this initiative! 🙏 https://t.co/WjLs...

Event-driven design is highly underutilized. It's the right architectural approach for many systems and applications but often it's too inconvenient to do. I'm trying to fix that with @livestoredev by making the right thing easy.