The Architecture of a Local-First Pain Tracker

Short summary

This article examines the architecture of PainTracker.ca, a privacy-first pain tracking app built on local-first principles. The author argues that core functionality must work offline without requiring accounts, analytics, or third-party services. Success requires treating local persistence as durable user data, properly handling service workers and export boundaries, and testing edge cases like offline entry and data migration.

• •Local-first architecture prioritizes the write path not requiring network, accounts, or remote services
• •Browser constraints require treating local persistence as a real data layer, not a cache
• •Export is a trust boundary—intentional and explicit, not automatic or silent

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