My Account of the Rhein-Main Rust Meetup
Friday 13th I joined the first Rhein-Main Area Rust Meetup in Darmstadt, Germany. The Meetup was at Cowo21 (German site), a coworking space. Apart from some difficulty to get a parking spot, it was a good location for the meetup, and according to the Organizer, Hanno Braun, free, which is nice of them.
I was a bit late, and most people had already settled in. Despite Rust being a young language, I think I counted about 18 people in the room. That’s a great response to a first meetup in an area – I remember the first Cologne meetup, which I skyped into, was a bit smaller.
We got labels to write our names on. I wrote my first name and my nick so people would recognize me. Some people did and thanked me for writing this blog. Nice to know it’s appreciated.
Hanno started the meetup with a Rust introduction, which was a bit short, just
about 30 minutes. According to him, his first Rust intro was a three-hours
ordeal, so I understand he tried the opposite approach. He used text editor
tabs with Rust code as slices, which had the nice benefit that he could call
rustc on a slide to show what it does. I think I’m going to steal this idea
for a future talk.
There weren’t too many questions; people seemed to already know at least a bit about Rust. Some people were completely silent, while others were asking questions and commenting on the talk.
Next, I held my own talk; mostly a high-level overview about clippy. I also recommended people to use multirust, compiletest_rs, rustfmt where applicable. It just appeared to me that I should have plugged quickcheck, too. Oh, and clippy is also pretty nice. ;-) Of the attendants, only two had used clippy before, and some seemed to be worrying about having to rustup every two days for it.
The point I tried to drive home is that a) clippy is pretty stable (we only have to rustup about every two weeks :-P) and b) you shouldn’t feel bad if you get clippy warnings; even the rust cracks get some now and then, so you’re in good company.
While the attendants seemed to be a diverse bunch of people age-, ethnicity- and occupation-wise, I only counted one woman. During my talk, I noticed her starting to ask a question when someone else blurted out another question and she either had found her answer or lost the courage to ask. We tend to forget that technical meetups can be pretty scary if you are in the minority. It’s a shame, too, because I’d loved to hear her unique viewpoint on Rust and the local community. In any event we may want want to improve our diversity work. I’m not too experienced in that area, but I’ll reach out to folks I know who are.
Anyway, after the talks we launched into some interesting (and at times passionately argued) technical discussions and the adage about time flying like an arrow certainly rang true. Hanno needed to catch his train about half past eleven; and I needed to catch some sleep. @Hanno: Thanks again for organizing the meetup. It has been very cool and I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be in Frankfurt on December 11th if all goes to plan.