Ideas for Rust Meetups

08 August 2018

Since I’m co-organizing the Rhein-Main Rust meetup (and am probably the main driving force behind it), I thought, it might be useful to share a few ideas we have that we have either already done, or plan doing – perhaps other meetup organizers can benefit from this. Note that our meetups usually run 2-4 hours, but some attendees may have to join late or leave early so the format has to take this into account.

The usual – some talks if any, sharing experiences

Discuss a Feature – Select a language feature or std API. Have everyone tell their experience with it, discuss how it interacts with other features, what idioms it enables, what pitfalls it enatils, etc.

Code Review – Everyone can bring a piece of code, the whole meetup reviews it

Mentoring round: Split the attendees into newbies and mentors. Have the mentors help the newbies with their current projects (or help them find one if they don’t already have one)

Clippy lint workshop – meet up and code clippy lints. It’s fun, but needs some preparation (select lint issues to work on, have a plan how to do it)

embedded Rust workshop – bring your own (or share) hardware and try to make the LEDs blink

crate polishing workshop – select a crate, find tasks (e.g. Cargo.toml attributes, README, code blocks / documentation) and split off small teams to work on them. This works best if the project maintainer is in the room to juggle the PRs

Rustc polishing workshop – same as crate polishing workshop, but for some part of the compiler. Needs to limit scope to a single compiler crate or even a subset of one, find the areas to work on before starting

Rust Docs workshop – same thing, but focused on docs

Similar, we could try barn-raising rust patterns or idioms

Micro Game Jam – Usually one has far more time to create games, so one needs a template project that has enough structure to work from – perhaps even allow folks to choose between multiple templates for different game styles

RFC sniping – Vote on an RFC to ‘snipe’, read it together and see if you can come up with improvements ranging from fixing typos to better examples, prior art etc.

Have you tried something like this – or something different – at your meetup? Or do you have other ideas? Discuss on reddit, twitter or rust-users!