(2024-07-17) Martin Going Back To Go Forward

Jess Martin: Going Back to Go Forward. Last Friday was my last day at DXOS.

*Before I talk about what's next, let's talk about what got me here.

Four years and ago, I penned the following words during a personal "career checkin":*

This checkin marked a career turning point

I was feeling the commercial constraints of that world and I sensed there was more to making better computers than maximizing SaaS rent extraction.

How might I free my thinking from optimizing for market size? The path seemed to be marked by a glowing sign pulsing the words RESEARCH.

Over the next four years, I worked on a variety of "future of computing" projects: Croquet, Fission, Daylight, and most recently, DXOS. One central lesson I learned across all of these projects is that innovation in tools is constrained by the underlying primitives: the protocols, programming languages, and platforms that the tools are built upon.

At Croquet, Fission, and DXOS, we worked to bring new primitives into the world

But as I worked on these projects, my mind would drift to the tools and the tool users.

A year or so ago, I formalized my long-term career objective as discovering and disseminating generalizable insights. A critical step in that process is "observing serious use of the system": This implies that the system that is built is actually useful for solving a real problem. In other words, it has to serve an important function with a context of use. People have to want to use it. (Bootstrapping)

Back to Apps: Where Humans and Computers Meet

The last few years, I have built dozens of applications with these new primitives

The applications weren't intended to be used in such a way that you could derive generalizable insights about the usage of the application itself. All of the insights were about the underlying primitives

Departing from DXOS is a return to tool-building. For this next phase, I intend to build systems with a real context of use at the Applications layer

It's still early days, but computing has better primitives. CRDTs, LLMs, performant p2p networking, cryptographic identity, blockchains. These foundational primitives have unlocked new capabilities at the level of humans interacting with computing systems.

three things:
I'm returning to a perennial passion: education
I'm working with a long-time friend and frequent co-conspirator
We are leveraging LLMs to bring sci-fi to life

If you want to follow along, we are working out loud in this Discord, sharing progress and demos and what we learn as we go.

There were many excellent talks at Local-first Conf, but Maggie Appleton's Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers is a visionary talk that beautifully illustrates my dreams for computing. I won't be coy; I was moved to tears. The talk develops through hand-drawn slides, a plethora of suggestive examples, and a compelling arc to deliver a core message: "users should have agency and ownership over their data and software." (2024-06-05) Appleton Homecooked Software And Barefoot Developers