OFFLFIRSOCH writ small
First published March 1, 2025.
There have been no updates since.
You’ve heard of OFFLFIRSOCH, right?
solderpunk, “Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2025”
I like this. Trouble is, I generally don’t have enough slack in my system to bang out a useful program in a month.
(…actually, banging out a useful program in a month is much, much easier now that large language models will bang out large amounts of plausibly-working code of questionable taste — and help you debug it when things inevitably go awry. But using LLMs running on Other People’s Computers feels weird for this kind of challenge. Of course, if you’re running it on hardware in your own home…)
So I’d like to offer these very related suggestions in the spirit of the challenge if you’re not quite up to doing OFFLFIRSOCH yourself:
Improve a preexisting offline thing
You know that app you made last year for OFFLFIRSOCH? Do you still like it? Does it need more love? Does it need better documentation so people other than you can pick it up and use it? Do you suspect that non-programmer nerds might not be using your app because they can’t get past `pip install` or `cargo install`? Might they need you to set up a build system to generate executables they can just drop in a directory in their $PATH or %PATH% or whatever they call it?
The preexisting offline thing doesn’t need to be yours, mind. To pick a nonrandom example:
sharkdp/numbat’s GitHub Issues labeled “good first issue”
Make something online-only (more) useful offline
As I write this (March 1, 2025) I just saw an update for my email service’s app saying they’re putting in some preliminary work to make it work offline. I can see why their app is currently online-only; it’s mostly just their web app packaged into an iOS app.
Of course, a proper email app ought to work offline — worst case, you don’t see the images in your email unless you’ve downloaded them previously.
Maybe there’s an app or website in your life that could be made useful offline.
Switch over to using someone else’s offline-first thing instead of a cloud thing for some task
I was always a bit weirded out that I was asking Google to do unit-aware math. Nowadays, if I need light unit-aware math doing on my computers (VERY broadly defined), I use Soulver. If I need to do proper unit-aware math on my computers, I use numbat.
Soulver (for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS)
Back in 2024 I used numbat in public:
If you like the idea of OFFLFIRSOCH but aren’t up to writing an entire program yourself in a month, you may want to consider simply adjusting your habits a bit to reach for a local app instead of some sort of cloud service when it comes to doing math with numbers.
If you’re looking for programs that run offline other than numbat, you could do worse than to skim the list of programs I’ve installed through Homebrew:
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