Rust Sydney had its first event last Monday! The first Rust gathering I know of in Sydney, in Australia, or in the whole southern hemisphere.

I had fun meeting all sorts of people interested in Rust: some who’d dived in deep already, some who’d only recently started playing with it, and some who’d been following for a while but had unfortunately not got time to actually use it (hopefully soon!).

Thanks to everyone who came and, to Envoy Advanced Technologies for providing the space and drinks, free of charge.

I started off with a brief talk, covering where Rust is now (and will be soon), built around the classic haiku:

a systems language

pursuing the trifecta

safe, concurrent, fast

My slides are online, although there’s no recording so they may not be so interesting. But you can get the human part of the experience by imagining this picture of me is moving.

(I was fortunate enough to schedule the meetup when Servo developer Simon Sapin happened to be in Sydney; he took all three photos in this article.)

I wrapped up and handed over to Steve Klabnik: he was in town for a conference and was the reason I was prompted into organising something, so Rust Sydney could start with a bang. We got a reprisal of his FOSDEM talk “The story of Rust” which was a really interesting overview of Rust since beginning as Graydon Hoare’s personal project around 2007, up until the impending 1.0 release. His slides (use left/right arrow keys to navigate) are also online, and hopefully the recording from FOSDEM will appear in the near future.

It was pleasantly surprising to see how many people were interested enough in Rust to come to a meetup, at least 30. More than I had expected and I didn’t even do much advertising. It was awesome!

I’ll be trying to organise more events, so be sure sign up to Rust Sydney to keep track (although I will post to users.r-l.o and /r/rust too). I hope to see you there.