I (Daniel) wanted to share the news that I will be leaving VMware / Wasm Labs soon, though I plan to stay involved with the Wasm ecosystem. VMware's commitment to Wasm is stronger than ever and the team’s mission will continue, and if anything, will expand.

When we created Wasm Labs roughly a year ago we were excited about WebAssembly and had lots of ideas of how to contribute to its adoption by the developer community. Looking back, we did accomplish quite a bit for such a small team, and we are now even more certain Wasm is the future of computing.

In these ten months we:

• Joined the Bytecode Alliance.
• Launched three major projects: mod_wasm for running traditional web apps, Wasm Workers Server for serverless, and Wasm Language Runtimes for pre-built binaries for many programming languages
• Collaborated with companies and projects as diverse as Wasm Edge, Fermyon, Suborbital, Microsoft, Docker, Liquid Reply, Automattic/WordPress, SQLite, Wasmtime, Shopify and many others to co-develop new features and use cases, contributing to upstream whenever possible.
• Shared what we built with other developers by speaking at WasmIO, Kubecon, Docker community days, Wasm day, Apachecon and other, smaller events. We also published detailed technical posts with our learnings as we built our projects, many of which made it to the top of Hacker News, which if you are a geek like us, it is a big deal!
• Had our work noticed and covered in major trade publications including The New Stack, which is doing great work in this area

Through this work we have reached literally hundreds of thousands of developers, got to meet (and learn from!) many great people at in-person events and hopefully made a meaningful contribution to overall Wasm adoption, while raising VMware's profile in the community.

What's next?

AI/ML! As many others, we are excited about the possibilities the latest developments in the field, including generative AI, mean for the industry. As part of a bigger organization (VMware AI Labs) we will continue our work on Wasm Workers Server and Language Runtimes, but now with a focus on AI-related functionality.

As with our previous work, we will continue our partnerships with others in the community and continue to open source our work and contribute upstream whenever possible. The Wasm ecosystem is already well positioned for AI/ML adoption, thanks to pioneering work by Wasm Edge and Intel, among others.

We look forward to continuing to work with all of you on this over the coming months!