Thread by @hirodusk

[ANN] Ink & Switch begins a new chapter with @pvh at the helm!

Anyone who's been part of the Ink & Switch community this past year knows that Peter is the obvious choice, but for those that haven't here's the backstory…

Five years ago, the three Heroku founders started a research lab to explore what's next for productive computing.

The 2015 pitch deck: inkandswitch.com/archive/rdlab-…

Peter joined us in 2017, opening a new track of research on CRDTs, peer-to-peer networking, and the decentralized web. His leadership here has been extraordinary.

In those first two years we had been doing the research but not publishing our findings.

Peter blazed a trail here with this article about Automerge, functional reactive programming, and the Dat protocol: inkandswitch.com/pixelpusher.ht…

Our first round of research funding was mostly spent by late 2018. We went on a publishing spree, developing our article style and public voice, culminating with the local-first essay in mid-2019. inkandswitch.com/local-first.ht…

After that, some of the lab members (including me) went to work on commercial spinouts of our research.

Peter picked up the leadership torch by running a series of weekly workshops and a small private Slack channel community over the remainder of 2019.

Even though my focus was on technology transfer to the Muse product, I was pleased and surprised by the ongoing emails to [e-mail] asking to work with us on projects like academic collaborations or hiring us for consulting.

Peter argued that the team culture, independent research approach, and brand equity we had built up in the lab set the stage for a more ambitious second act.

He began working with the other lab members on a vision and concrete plan for funding and executing that work.

This summer Peter put together three new research projects, most notably Cambria project on data lenses with rising star @geoffreylitt.

inkandswitch.com/cambria.html

What's next for Ink & Switch? I’ll leave it to @pvh to articulate the vision when he’s ready, but I’ll just say that what I’ve seen so far is exciting.

I'll be serving as an advisor and member of the board. And with the admin duties off my plate, maybe even room for some research work as a side project or connected to our goals at @MuseAppHQ.

Here's to a bright future for independent research! ✨