You can build applications with a local-first focus. We will cover what WASM is, how it came to be and some of its history, as well as a case study focused on an app I made for myself. In the case study, we dig into how you might use WASM to run Whisper.cpp for Speech-to-text and also use WASM to host a local SQLite database. The only reason we need a network connection at all for this application is to get the initial JS payload and to download the Whisper models from a remote store since they can get quite large.