James Arthur

The first batch of talks are published, the remaining will be published by end of week. 🌟
youtube.com/playlist?lis...

for this holiday season we've added little fairies to tldraw.com who can work with you on the canvas. they're not very good but they try hard. and they can work together!

Awesome intro to Sync Conf from @thruflo.com, asking the question where sync fits in this fast changing world of AI.
Sync, as it happens, is a key component to this bright future!

You didn’t think we weren’t going to drop something big today for @syncconf.bsky.social did you?

Query-driven sync. In @tanstack.com DB. No re-write needed. Let’s do this 🔥

🚀 TanStack DB 0.5 is here with Query-Driven Sync

Your component's query IS the API call. No custom endpoints. No GraphQL resolvers. Just write your query and DB figures out exactly what to fetch.

Details 🧵👇

Full lineup and schedule for @syncconf.bsky.social in SF on Nov 12. Link in the 🧵 below 👇

SF Systems Meetup: Databases and Stateful Apps · Luma The SF Systems Meetup is back with a pair of talks giving us a peek at the future of state management! This month, we're excited to have talks from Almog Gavra…

If you find yourself in SF next week, @almog.xyz is talking about SlateDB at the SF Systems Meetup on Wednesday!

Godot IDE Engineer Help build native, visual version control for collaborative game development in Godot

🎮 Like CRDTs and videogames? @inkandswitch.com is ✨hiring✨ for a project that combines @automerge.org with @godotengine.org to make the next generation of collaboration tools for game development!

More detail here: inkandswitch.com/jobs/godot-i...

(Fully remote 🌍🌎🌏 contract, late Nov to April)

The panel at Sync Conf 2025 brings together @tannerlinsley.com, @jamescowling.dev, @schickling.dev and @aaronboodman.com for a deep dive into challenges and tradeoffs between the technical approaches being explored in sync today.

It was agonizing to choose from among the 34 excellent submissions, but here are the four talks selected from our CFP process!

James Arthur @thruflo.com is building @electric-sql.com, the sync engine behind @tanstack.com and @elixir-lang.org. At Sync Conf 2025, he’ll kick things off with an intro on why sync matters for AI apps and agentic systems, including a demo of sync-based software in action.

Sync seems to be having a moment among web developers!

Our second #special is out.

Following the great success of @localfirstconf.com in Berlin, we're excited to share more about the vision for SyncConf 2025 in SF.

Full episode links and show notes in the comments.

I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response.

so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...

One day boutique conference for the sync era of the web. Hear from the world's top builders about how to develop systems in the era of agentic software and real-time sync.

Announcing Sync Conf 2025. Join us in SF on Nov 12th.

Burn | ElectricSQL Agentic system built on Postgres and a real-time sync stack.

electric-sql.com/demos/burn

For me, as a generalist software engineer, that's really exciting. Because it brings this whole revolution of agentic systems right back into my wheelhouse.

There's obviously a lot of work involved in putting those aspects together to create a working agentic product.

However, from an *infra* point of view, there's nothing there that doesn't pattern match to a database, some processes and real-time sync.

Instructing LLMs means sending an instruction to an LLM. Agentic memory is where you store data that those instructions are based on. Retrieval is the ability to query that data. Context engineering retrieves and formats the right information to send in the instruction.

Agents are essentially processes that instruct LLMs to make tool calls.

Bringing agents back down to earth | ElectricSQL Agentic AI, beneath all the hype, is actually just normal software. You can build agentic systems with a database, standard web tooling and real-time sync.

LangChain, vector databases, instruction routing, specialized memory stores.

You'd be forgiven for thinking you need a whole new stack to build agentic systems. However, that isn't actually the case: electric-sql.com/blog/2025/08...

Agentic AI, beneath all the hype, is actually just normal software. You can build agentic systems with a database, standard web tooling and real-time sync.

I'm sure if it weren’t for AI, the web dev community would be talking a lot more about sync engines and TanStack DB right now.

I just published a short video + blog post to share why I’m so excited about TanStack DB and ElectricSQL!

youtu.be/OKHYUISDYmk

TanStack DB with Sync provides an exciting new way to add end-to-end reactivity to your web applications, including optimistic UI updates. 🧵

ElectricSQL recently completed a 120-day reliability sprint. Our one goal: make our sync engine so boring-reliable you stop thinking about it and just build.

We chased every incident, fixed every user-reported bug, and made unglamorous work our priority. 🧵

I know I wrote the blog post but holy fuck this is good.

Local-first sync with TanStack DB and Electric | ElectricSQL Tanstack DB is a reactive client store for building super fast apps on sync. Paired with Electric, it provides an optimal end-to-end sync stack for local-first app development.

Paired with Electric, TanStack DB provides an optimal end-to-end sync stack for local-first app development.

electric-sql.com/blog/2025/07...

Tanstack DB is a reactive client store for building super fast apps on sync.

Based on a TypeScript implementation of differential dataflow, it's type-safe, declarative, incrementally adoptable and insanely fast.

Very excited to have reached the Beta milestone with @tanstack.com DB 🚀🎉
It’s been a privilege to work with @tannerlinsley.com and the team on building this, absolute rock stars!