My personal Rust 2017 retrospective

I noticed recently that 2017 was such an active year in Rust for me that I feel like I want to note stuff down. Especially my community work rarely leaves lasting artifacts, so noting them down is an attempt to keep them around.

Rust Hack & Learn Berlin

Let’s start with a downending. Because of my work involvement, I haven’t visited and managed the Rust Hack & Learn Berlin as much as I wanted.

I’ll try to do that more this year ;).

RustFest Kyiv & Zurich

RustFest is growing nicely and I’ve been involved. Even though I can claim to have started RustFest, speaking about them in those terms is always hard: none of them would have worked without the local teams, which all have their own ways of doing things and are so great at organising stuff.

I was very happy that we could also serve more (geographically) eastern community with the Kyiv one, travel for large crowds is still an issue.

RustFest teams, you rock!

Off to Paris, next!

MozFest

I helped organising a table at MozFest. Response was great, a lot of people coming around to ask a lot of things. Basically, 2 days of talking…

Talks

I’ve given a couple of talks this year, some of which don’t have a video :).

Mozilla Dev Roadshow Hamburg and Berlin: Rust (20 min)

RubyC: Potential (about Community work, touching on Rust work) (40min)

HTWG Konstanz: The Rust Community (30 min)

HTWG Konstanz: Concurrency and Futures (60 min)

GOTO Nights Berlin: An introduction to Rust (30 min)

Rust Hungary: An introduction to Rust (20 min planned, 40 min actual)

GOTO Berlin: Why is Rust successful? (50 min)

Open Source Business Alliance: Rust (5 min)

Rust Oslo: Why is Rust successful? (50 min)

The YouTube channel

I tried to make our YouTube Channel the one-stop resource to find all videos about Rust on YouTube. That has worked.

With more then 5000 subscribers and constant growth, it hosts all videos of all Rust conferences.

More about that later.

The Rust Herald

I started the Rust Herald as a kind of a community-owned channel last year. It didn’t really catch on, so either I have to continue promoting it or shut it down. It’s probably going to be shut down unless someone wants to take it over.

Code

Most of my code ended up being experiments on my GitHub. I’m currently trying to port webmachine to Rust, under the name of Gerust, let’s see how far that goes.

Two projects I started and want to end over the year are cute, a small book about futures, implementing a simple executor and “the memory is hot lava”, a zero-knowledge introduction into memory using Rust and drawings.

Community team

Community team was a bit of a sideshow this year, to admit, with two conferences to work on and all. Obviously, I still answered email and contact people, but I couldn’t get a checkmark on something huge. But lots of tiny bits also make an impact :).

That has changed during the end of the year, with new leadership and a lot of changes coming up! Stay tuned!

Professionally

I’ve grown a small Rust business, giving training. I gave a total of 6 trainings with 3 days each over the last year. One of the trainings was an advanced engineer training at Mozilla. Material can be found here.

If you want to hire me or my colleagues for training or work, please contact us at asquera.

A personal thanks

I’ve been really happy to work with all the individuals in the Rust team over the last year.

The project from the outside might sometimes feel like a rather homogenous group, but it really isn’t. This is great, it helps us to constantly adapt and improve, especially with the current growth of the community. Issues are raised and cleared regularly, making the project a joy to work with.

Also, all the community workers around the globe, running meetups, doing translations and so on: you’re doing a great work! You are the backbone of Rust’s success.