Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
---------------------------

I am pleased to announce that today marks the beginning of the
third ever annual OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge, OFFLFIRSOCH
2026.  Let us once again reject modernity and embrace tradition,
specifically by remembering that the entire gosh darned revolutionary
*point* of the personal computer is that you actually have your
very own, well, personal computer, right there on your desk, or in
these most decadent of times in your very pocket, with all of its
capabilities right there for your exclusive use at your whim and
fancy whenever the need should take you.  Sharing some invisible,
distant computer which you don't even own with countless other users
by means of a dumb terminal and a long serial cable is a primitive,
brutish way of life that we gladly left behind.  LARPing those
times with would-have-been-supercomputers and wireless networks is
an absurdity.  The ever-online computer is weak and vulnerable,
to network outages and to attacks, and constantly changes at the
whims of people who are not you (many of those people don't even
*like* you!).  Constant change is the enemy of reliability, and
robs you of your birthright to master your tools through a lifetime
of use.  The offline-first computer is strong, resilient, dependable
and able to be mastered.  It works today as it worked yesterday,
which is how it will work tomorrow, unless you will it otherwise.

Whoo, bracing stuff, alright!  Yeah, there are may be some
contradictions lurking in there, both internal ones and ones
with other stuff I've said or implied or even done, but there
are both nuggets *and* kernels of wisdom and truth in there, too,
I promise.  If you perceive them as well, OFFLFIRSOCH is for you!
To participate, all you need to do is to develop and share during
the month of March a piece of software which could reasonably be
considered "offline-first".  This is not to say that your software
must not touch any network at any time under any circumstances,
although naturally such offline-first-and-last projects fit the bill,
and historically are probably the kind of thing that folks write the
most.  The real point is that core functionality must remain possible
even when connectivity is sparse.  Network-aware applications are
admissible so long as workflows based around e.g. short-term weekly
or monthly connections are treated as first class considerations and
work well.  There are no restrictions on what your software actually
does, but it's kind of the idea that it does something offline which
these days folks would maybe do online by default even though there's
no compelling reason to do it online beyond the fact that we've kind
of made a mess of the world such that it's somehow easier that way.
Similarly, there are no restrictions on what language your software
is 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 (any Earth timezone), 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.  As previously announced, I
won't be able to reply to any emails for the first half of the month,
but rest assured they will be seen and your contribution counted!

If you need a little further inspiration or some slightly less
goofballish exposition of the aims and motivations of this whole
exercise, feel free to peruse both the announcements and the lists
of entries from previous years [1,2]

Looking forward to seeing what folk come up with!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/offlfirsoch/2024
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/offlfirsoch/2025