My roommate partied all night in Rio. I ended up building local-first JS on the stairs.

Short summary

A developer shares a 2012 anecdote about building an offline-first quote system for an equipment rental company while stuck on a Rio staircase during Carnival. The narrative reflects on how local-first patterns, once requiring clever workarounds, are now standard framework features. Ends with an invitation for similar developer war stories.

• •Personal engineering story from 2012: built offline-first browser app with Heroku hosting for client with no-WiFi requirements
• •Reflective commentary on technical progress—patterns once novel now feel routine; questions whether modern AI agents would trivialize such problems
• •Story-driven narrative, not instructional; low practical utility for current work

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.