RustConf 2020 Links
github.com
github.com
I don't think I learned anything.
It made me feel proud to be part of a group that is all about empowering the people that need it most. People that are typically marginalized.
How values aren’t an option; how deciding not to have values is itself a value choice.
The whole event made me even more excited about Rust, and building in an ecosystem that is very explicitly inclusive.
I guess i was just hoping for more technical content. Maybe I just had the wrong expectations. In the other Rust conferences there were always at least one or two more technical talks.
I love the diversity visible in RustConf speakers (and I often wonder how much of it is by design).
Traditionally, the way that RustConf's program works is, keynote speakers are invited, everyone else goes through a blinded review process. I don't know for sure how it went this year, but one of the organizers did say "speakers were picked blind" on reddit.
Last year, RustConf did one day, but two parallel tracks. Fourteen talks instead of seven helps a lot, and lets you accept things in a much broader range of topics and difficulties.
2020 is... not a usual year for events. There are also more conferences these days, and with different focuses. Oxidize is very different than RustFest is different than RustConf is different than all the other various confs.
Once the main conference on a technology starts to primarily target experts, you should start worrying about that technology.
The only ways to avoid “Many people are still new to Foo” are either to organize specialized conferences, or to have a conference on a (slowly) dying technology, where new users are rare.
The latter technologies tend not to have large conferences, so large conferences will mostly go for breadth, rather than depth (a workaround is to have both, with the ‘in depth’ sessions typically in smaller rooms)
Maybe I just know Rust better now and what felt technical back then does not anymore.
A case of the exception proving the rule, here?
That said, conference session videos are typically much less informative than the papers. Certainly the content per unit time required is lower in video.
Languages and systems are tied to communities and ecosystems.
I would say that the core developers if various kernels and OSes wield a lot of power. A community designed to be inclusive should be a part of that.
It really is political, you can draw lines between this and what’s currently happening in America with the mainstream acknowledgment of systemic racism. Power needs to be redistributed in that scenario too.