Quartz promotes WIlliams to director of the workshop

Zach Seward, senior vice president of product and executive editor at Quartz, sent out the following announcement to the staff:

Hi, all.

Sam Williams is now director of the workshop. It’s a new position that codifies and expands the role he has played unofficially for a while now, and it’s a well-deserved promotion after nearly five years of work at Quartz.

As director of the workshop, Sam will be responsible for pursuing experiments that could benefit Quartz and/or our staff. He’ll work on prototypes that make use of new technologies and could ultimately turn into full-fledged product offerings. And he’ll help other employees pursue similar experiments for their own work and professional development.

Sam, as most of you well know, has been with Quartz from the beginning. He created much of the original code for qz.com, our log-in system, and most of the server infrastructure that we still rely on every day. Then he built many of our most experimental products, from annotations on the website to the Quartz iPhone app. He’s also contributed some of the geekiest aspects of Quartz culture, from Marvin Prime to an API for our dishwasher in the second New York office.

This new role is intended to maintain that spirit of experimentation, which has come to define Quartz and helped make us successful. At our larger size, it’s necessary to make official parts of the company that developed organically, like this one.

Expect to hear more from Sam about how you can participate in these activities. Sam will report to me in his new role and be part of the product management group on the product team. Please join me in congratulating him.