Joel Gustafson | Protocol Labs Research

Joel Gustafson

Education

BS in Mathematics with Computer Science, 2018
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joel’s research is in knowledge representation and distributed systems. At Protocol Labs, he is working to create a decentralized semantic web to enable more open and equal access to information. His other interests span interface design, media theory, human-computer interaction, and programming language theory. Joel has previously worked at the Media Lab, CSAIL, and Notion Labs, and holds a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT.

Areas of Expertise

Distributed Systems, Networking, Knowledge Representation

Talks

2021-01-19

The Underlay: A distributed public knowledge graph
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.01.19

2018-10-23

The Underlay: The inevitable future of knowledge
Lab Day 2018 / 2018.10.23 / San Francisco, CA, USA

Blog posts

2021-06-23/Blog

Designing a dataflow editor with TypeScript and React

This is a design report – a story about the tradeoffs and challenges that we encountered while building a medium-complexity React component in TypeScript. These include:

state modeling (“making illegal states unrepresentable”)
basic type-level programming in TypeScript
DX patterns for generically typed React components
DX patterns for reusable controlled components using a Redux-like action/dispatch state paradigm

These topics all deal with the external interface and TypeScript typings; lower-level implementation challenges (like optimizing drag interactions and sharing state between React and D3) have been left to a future post.