Rejoice! It's time once again for the OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge. OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 marks the second ever installment of this relatively new community event. If it's not really your cup of tea, well, let this announcement perhaps also serve as your six month advance warning for ROOPHLOCH 2025, which will begin on the first of September.
To participate in OFFLFIRSOCH, you should develop and share during the month of March a piece of software which could reasonably be considered "offline-first". No attempt at a precise definition of offline-first is offered. The idea is that we as a community recognise it when we see it, and there's really no incentive to attempt to bend the rules. Software which does not make any use of networking whatsoever obviously qualifies, but network-aware software may also do so, if it still retains the ability to be genuinely useful even if connectivity is intermittent and infrequent. There are no restrictions on what your software actually does, what language it's written in, what platform it runs on or even on the license it is released under. Just make it offline-first and announce it in a post to your phlog and/or gemlog with an (honest!) datestamp some time in March, and that's it. Email me a link to the announcement post and I will compile a list to share with everybody at the end of the month.
Despite the deliberate lack of restrictions on what your offline-first software actually does, the intended "spirit" of OFFLFIRSOCH is to be an act of...well, it sounds a bit grandiose, but resistance, or defiance, or at least some kind of expression of discontent at the fact that modern computing devices have more processing power and storage space than ever before, but are increasingly used as dumb clients for accessing online services, services which we have little to no control over or reasonable expectation of longevity from. Reaching out to random servers run by who-knows-who, to who-knows-what end, servers which need to be kept online 24/7/365, consuming electricity and emitting heat, in order to solve trivial computational tasks like unit conversions, timezone conversions, or generating a random password is an obviously absurd practice which most of us engage in with increasing frequency because somehow we've ended up in a world where this is the path of least resistance. OFFLFIRSOCH is an opportunity to reflect on tasks you routinely solve using the internet which can obviously be solved well enough without using the internet, and to build yourself the tools to make that possible.
If you need a little further inspiration, feel free to peruse the list of last year's entries: