Building with Rust

This episode, we're joined by Ernest Kissiedu, who is the community lead of the Rust London user group as well as a co-founder of the DevX Initiative, which empowers current and would-be Rust contributors through research, workshops, and sponsorship.

Ernest tells the story of how he fell in love with Rust, how he got into organizing one of the largest local Rust user groups, as well as how he started the DevX Initiative. He also opens up about the challenges he faces running such a unique initiative, along with the possible shiny future of Rust that he hopes the DevX Initiative will help bring to fruition.

Blog post announcing that the DevX Initiative is now independent: https://medium.com/@thedevxinitiative/the-independent-devx-initiative-3aff64fcf3dc.

You can find the DevX Initiative on Twitter @DevXInitiative.

You can find the Rust London user group on Twitter @RustLondon_.

You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server.

Timestamps

00:26 - Welcome

00:35 - Ernest's intro

01:26 - How Ernest got into Rust

09:02 - Rust game development in the early days

11:46 - Rust's community is its most compelling feature

13:28 - Ernest's journey to becoming community lead of the Rust London user group

22:30 - How Ernest co-founded the DevX Initiative

29:00 - The DevX Initiative going independent

34:34 - DevX and the Rust Foundation are both working towards the same goal

38:00 - Ernest's personal projects

43:42 - Contributing in ways other than coding

48:16 - Widening the definition of what it means to be a 'contributor'

50:26 - Summarizing and wrapping up

53:41 - Ernest's sign-off

55:16 - Outro

Nick Cameron sat down to chat with us about his Rust journey, including his experiences working as a member of the Rust core team back in the language's pre-1.0 days. He left the core team and open source contributor-ship in 2019 due to his growing family, but has since returned to full-time open source work; he spends most of his time now consolidating the different pillars that make up Rust's async ecosystem. Through it all, he has learned how to effectively juggle open source work with his priorities as a parent and family man.

Nick's website is https://ncameron.org. You can follow him on Twitter @nick_r_cameron.

The Rust 2021 annual survey results blog post: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/15/Rust-Survey-2021.html

Nick's blog post on the portable and interoperable async Rust initiative: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/portable-and-interoperable-async-rust/

Nick's Rust in 2022 blog post: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/rust-in-2022-2/

You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server.

Timestamps

1:09 - Nick's intro

2:04 - Nick's history with Rust

7:14 - Memories from working on Rust pre-1.0

8:48 - Dynamically-sized types have some rough edges

12:31 - Reflecting on the Rust core team

17:43 - The portable and interoperable async initiative

31:16 - How much should the Rust standard library support async programming?

35:47 - Returning to full-time open source work

46:08 - Juggling open source work and parenting

55:00 - Nick's sign-off

57:28 - Outro

We sat down with Josh Triplett, co-lead of the Rust Language team, to chat about his journey into Rust contributorship and what considerations he makes when iterating on a language as widely-used as Rust. We also discuss Josh's ideal build system, as well as what changes he thinks the Rust language and community need to make in order for Rust to stay relevant well into the future.

If you're interested in finding out more about the build system Josh is building, head on over to https://buildit.dev.

The Lang team's decision-making process is documented over at https://lang-team.rust-lang.org/decision_process.html.

Josh's homepage is located at https://joshtriplett.org. You can find him on Twitter @josh_triplett.

You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server.

Timestamps

0:40 - Welcome

0:52 - Josh's intro

1:29 - How Josh is spending his days

3:05 - Josh's initial experiences playing with Rust

7:14 - How Josh got into contributing to Rust

8:42 - Explaining some of Rust's pre-1.0 features

11:43 - Why do some features get stabilized and others don't?

13:12 - Important language design considerations

17:42 - Most memorable moments working on the Lang team

23:45 - Difficulties to working on the Lang team

25:51 - How do you keep your Rust work sustainable?

30:30 - What are the most important things in Rust that need working on?

34:12 - Advice for those looking to do more high-impact but less visible work

37:21 - Writing code is not the only way to contribute to Rust

39:34 - Why build a new build system?

50:09 - Long-term changes to the Rust language and community you'd like to see

1:05:29 - What fictional world would Josh most like to visit?

1:11:58 - Josh's sign-off

1:13:15 - Outro

We chat with Leonora Tindall, one of the co-authors of the 2nd edition of Programming Rust, about her experiences working on the book, the various roles she has worked in using Rust, and about the state of academic computer science education.

Nora's blog can be found at https://nora.codes/. Her Twitter handle is @NoraDotCodes.

Visit https://play.google.com/store?code=3MNQ2X1ZPV6TT to receive 40% off the full price of Programming Rust 2nd Edition.

You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server.

Timestamps

0:40 - Welcome

1:12 - Nora's intro

1:58 - Thoughts on podcasts in the Rust community

4:12 - Are you ok with listening to your own recorded voice?

5:13 - Nora's work history

8:29 - Working on the second edition of Programming Rust

12:00 - Developing empathy as educators

15:40 - Keeping the Mandelbrot renderer project from the first edition

17:30 - Who should you buy the second edition of Programming Rust?

24:31 - Learning programming should be more fun

26:37 - Working on cancer discovery at CancerIQ

33:23 - Working on edge delivery at Fastly

35:18 - Being California transplants to the midwest

36:37 - Nora's unconventional college experience

37:58 - Shuffleboard as a team-building activity

38:45 - Thoughts on academic computer science education

49:12 - What fictional world would you most like to visit?

55:01 - Nora's sign-off

56:09 - Outro

We sat down with Ralf Jung who is, at the time of this recording, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). Ralf is part of the RustBelt project, which seeks to define and develop rigorous formal foundations for the Rust programming language.

We talked with Ralf about GhostCell, a technique for separating permissions from data in Rust that opens up possibilities and alternative strategies when it comes to working around Rust's "aliasing XOR mutability" rules, why there seems to be such a large gap between academic programming languages and "mainstream" programming languages, as well as what makes for a good PL researcher.

Ralf blogs about Rust, and other topics, at https://www.ralfj.de/blog/.

matthieu-m's Ghost Collections crate is referenced during the show and can be found at https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections.

Send us an email at [email protected] to suggest cool people or projects in the Rust ecosystem you'd like us to have on the show!