16 – Anselm Eickhoff Jazz

Anselm Eickhoff
And a big part of what made that layer possible was learning about ink and switch and their blog posts and publications. Seeing auto merge as the first CRDT that I encountered and being like, oh wow. Even just the idea of having like synced state between two text editors is super interesting. Like, um, let’s build the layer around that. And then once I had that layer, I looked at it and I was like, damn, this is like really interesting, not just for garden, but I kind of want to build every app ever like this and all. Thinking of all the apps I had built in the past, all the other apps I still wanted to build, all the apps I didn’t even know I could build yet. And I’m like, if I feel like that, probably other people will too. They just don’t know yet that it’s even possible to have this abstraction. So therefore I should probably try and make this a framework. And that’s the origin story of Jazz, right? That makes a lot of sense.

Johan Schickling
You see some proof for other apps, like being able to build something in an experience that you wouldn’t quite know how you would replicate that. You go on looking around for ideas, and luckily, they’re very smart people, like the folks associated with Ink and Switch, who also write about that and inspire others. And that leads you to maybe also be very compelled by those ideas, but maybe you have some slightly different takes. And so this is where it evolves. That makes a lot of sense. And I see a lot of parallels there for past endeavors and current endeavors that I’m on. So this is what led to JAZZ. And I think there’s a lot of similarities for how other data technologies like in the local first space came to be. And throughout the further conversation, I’m sure we’ll learn about what makes the specific flavor of Jazz, how that compares to others.