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Comment by jcpst | Hacker News Reader

I actually felt like I learned a lot. Not so much technical stuff, but more about how intentional the community is designed.

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.

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I already knew that Rust's community was great.

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.

> 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.

I love the diversity visible in RustConf speakers (and I often wonder how much of it is by design).

I was on the RustConf program committee in past years, but not this year.

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.

A blind review process is great! I'm just wondering if this was truly the case here as there were disproportionately more women and people of the LGBT community than white cisgender males.

You can invent a conspiracy theory about anything.

The diversity of the community is by design (inclusiveness takes work). The diversity of RustConf is just a side effect of that plus an anonymized review process.

I think the speakers aren't diverse by design, but they've made the community very inclusive, so the speakers are naturally diverse by being a representation of the community. I've always thought it's impressive how the Rust community has managed to walk the fine line between "we want to encourage diversity in our community" and "we give preference to traditionally disadvantaged groups".

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