Agentic AI
How a Prisma Founder Is Rebuilding Music Apps With Client-Side Event Sourcing
Johannes Schickling moved beyond traditional server-centric architecture to explore local-first development, leveraging SQLite and event sourcing to deliver desktop-grade experiences on the web.
InfoQ
Johannes Schickling, the founder of Prisma, spent years refining server-side database tooling before pivoting to what he calls a more fundamental rethinking of how applications should work. His journey reveals a growing recognition among software architects that the traditional three-tier web stack—with its centralized database, API layer, and thin client—leaves users with experiences that lag far behind what desktop software has delivered for decades.
The Problem Schickling Left Behind#
Throughout his career building tools for developers, Schickling grew convinced that data architecture is the highest-leverage decision an architect can make. The conventional approach—routing all operations through a central server—creates bottlenecks that manifest as loading spinners, form reloads, and offline failures. When he began asking why web applications feel fundamentally less responsive than, say, Apple Notes, the answer pointed to a architectural mismatch.
He observed that Google Docs, Figma, and Linear—each a distinct step forward in user experience—share something in common: they break from traditional patterns by managing more data operations on the client side. That observation coincided with his introduction to the local-first movement through researchers at Ink and Switch, crystallizing a new direction for his work.
From Idea to Implementation: Overtone and LiveStore#
Schickling channeled this insight into building Overtone, a music curation application that reclaims the sense of ownership users felt with personal music libraries before streaming services took over. Rather than using mainstream local-first technologies, he opted to pair client-side event sourcing with SQLite, a choice that emerged from both practical needs and research collaboration.
Working alongside MIT PhD researchers Nicholas Schiefer and Geoffrey Litt, Schickling developed LiveStore—a SQLite-based, event-sourcing framework that handles Local-First operations. Unlike CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data types), which excel at collaborative conflict resolution, event sourcing prioritizes robust historical tracking and deterministic replay of user actions. This architectural choice reflects his conviction that data strategy must fit the specific application; no single technology works for every use case.
