When I look at the WebAssembly ecosystem today, I see a huge variety of excited people, inspiring projects, and fledgling efforts to figure out how this new generation of compute will fit into the world. Every single day I find something new to get excited about, and seeing Wasm posts on the front page of Hacker News day after day tells me I’m not alone. If you combine that with the number of people in my inbox thrilled about what the technology can enable for them, it’s quite apparent why WebAssembly keeps us up at night with giddy thoughts about what comes next. After talking with people in the space, we've decided we want to help move the community and the technology forward by supporting people and projects working with WebAssembly.
Today I'm thrilled to unveil the Suborbital Innovators in Residence program (I2R for short). This program is designed to help people and teams who are working on new and novel use-cases for WebAssembly. The program consists of a few elements, including access to our team of Wasm experts, promotion via our blog and social accounts, a monthly stipend to support these projects, access to our network of investors and potential users, and over time a community of folks working on interesting new applications of Wasm side by side. We’ll be starting with a 6-month program, re-evaluating regularly to ensure everyone is getting the most out of it. To kick things off, we're opening applications to anyone who would be interested in joining, and we're announcing the first two members of the program, Yurii Rashkovskii and Ashley Jeffs.
Yurii is working on a research project to advance the state of art of cloud application development called ParaOS. ParaOS leverages the technological capabilities and the adoption momentum of WebAssembly to create building blocks for modern distributed, polyglot applications.
Ashley is building Benthos, a very powerful stream processor with a great mascot. Benthos is designed to 'make fancy stream processing operationally mundane', and it accomplishes this using declarative configuration, a custom language, and a plugin system.
We think investing in awesome people and projects like these is key to making WebAssembly a successful technology platform, and we're sure we can help folks looking to experiment with the technology make a meaningful impact. If you're working on a project related to Wasm, or have been wanting to start something new but you're looking for support, please apply to join the program! We'll be bringing people in slowly at first, but we hope to support as many projects as we can.
WebAssembly has the potential to change how we run software at a fundamental level. The current state of cloud computing, edge computing, global infrastructure, and client-side software are all impacted by the adoption and advancement of Wasm. Improving security, performance, portability, and developer experience are all possible if the industry welcomes this new technology into their stack, and we couldn't be more excited to help.
Please join me in welcoming Yurii and Ashley to the I2R, we look forward to seeing what our incredible innovators build. Keep an eye on the Suborbital blog to hear more from them, and apply to join us if you're interested in changing how the industry builds powerful computing systems.