localfirst.fm

The episode delivers substantial technical and business insights about building resilient sync systems, networking challenges, and product strategy trade-offs. Fish articulates specific lessons from Realm's failures with OT (quadratic complexity, stickiness issues) and explains concrete architectural choices at Ditto (CRDTs, metadata-heavy approaches, peer-to-peer). However, pacing includes some conversational filler and the discussion occasionally retreats into high-level positioning rather than deep technical specifics.

“the actual algorithm itself, given that if you have a long history with devices that have been offline for a while, you're gonna have quadratic complexity to being able to transform the operations for the other devices”

“on the networking side it's all about balancing trade-offs and managing like the reactions to the environment that you don't have full control over”

Fish presents a genuinely original thesis: that hardware maturity (not just algorithmic innovation) was the enabling constraint for peer-to-peer sync, and that CRDTs succeed partly because they solve server scaling problems (device migration) before solving peer-to-peer. The anechoic chamber testing and the specific insight about building an overlay mesh network with observability are fresh. However, the core CRDT-vs-OT comparison and local-first philosophy are now established thinking in the community.

“Ditto as a company or technology, it had a requirement on the edge, peer-to-peer aspect of whether or not the hardware had reached maturity to pull it off”

“the main reason I was first drawn to it, was that stickiness problem... if you can migrate around to different nodes in a server itself, why can't the nodes at the edge talk to each other?”

Adam Fish is a genuinely exceptional guest for this podcast. He is a serial operator with 15 years in the space (startup, Realm pre-acquisition, now CEO of Ditto), has shipped products to major airlines, and brings both technical depth (CRDT implementation, networking protocol design) and business acumen (pivoted from CRM, raised funding, navigated Realm's sale). He reflects critically on past failures and makes hard trade-off decisions. This is exactly the caliber of practitioner the B2B index should reward.

“I'm the CEO co-founder of Ditto”

“I have like actually a pitch deck that's like hilariously similar to stuff with Ditto from, 2013 timeframe”

The episode includes many specific examples (Realm, airline names, Bluetooth/WiFi protocols, the anechoic chamber with 100 devices, Firebase/Salesforce parallels) and concrete metrics (15-year journey, 2018 founding, ~1 year to working prototype, 2-year timeline for iOS stability). However, it lacks specific data on adoption scale, transaction throughput, latency improvements, or quantified business metrics (revenue, customer counts). The airline use case is vivid but not deeply measured.

“Delta, Alaska Airlines, Lufthansa, Japan Airlines, ANA, like major airlines around the world have adopted Ditto”

“we had a prototype in like August and September of 2018. We didn't really have a solid functioning version until a year later. and that was really only on iOS. The Android one didn't come later, so I mean, it was practically two years”

Schickling asks solid foundational questions (why CRDTs over OT, how Ditto differs from Firebase, which platforms) and follows up meaningfully on the networking challenges and observability problem. However, he rarely pushes back or probe deeper into contradictions. For instance, Fish claims the airline pitch app "wasn't even working," phones were crashing, yet executives were impressed - Schickling could have pressed on what that implies about user tolerance or MVP standards. The conversational tone is warm but lacks the sharpness needed to extract maximum insight.

“So staying maybe at this timeframe for a little bit, if you consider the technology that you've had built out back then and today, like today, you probably have like orders of magnitude of more like capabilities”

“I wanna linger on this point for a little bit since we're thinking about syncing your mind typically goes to getting data from A to B”