
RustConf 2020 Links - jerodsanto
https://github.com/poteto/rustconf-2020
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fluffything
I skimmed through the talks and the content seems to be more focused at PMs
evaluating using Rust than at Rust programmers themselves.

I don't think I learned anything.

~~~
steveklabnik
Creating a program is always difficult. Historically, there's been a big
tension with Rustconf, and that's that many people are still new to Rust, so
serving them best involves accepting talks that are more broad, both in scope
and difficulty. It's _really_ hard to pick talks for something as big as a
language ecosystem for a one-day, one track conference.

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.

~~~
Someone
_“and that 's that many people are still new to Rust, so serving them best
involves accepting talks that are more broad, both in scope and difficulty”_

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)

------
nicolashahn
The talks themselves:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXMg9OzWrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXMg9OzWrQ)

~~~
secondcoming
I had the misfortune of randomly skipping to the 'Rust wants to be political'
presentation.

~~~
smolder
All of that was fine with me except for the weird use of "redistribute", as in
"rust wants to redistribute the power of systems programming", which I don't
think is an appropriate use of the word. It implies there is a limited pool of
"systems programming power" to distribute, which doesn't make sense.
Empowerment means giving people power, but the power isn't taken from
somewhere else in this case.

~~~
jcpst
I think it’s worth considering the meaning in this case, especially since all
of the language was so intentional in that segment.

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.

~~~
smolder
I stand by my criticism there. Systems programming is not a hierarchical
thing, anyone can do it without stepping on anyone else's toes. Just build
something. You can give people the power without taking it from anywhere. Is
software dev political? Sure. But "Redistribute" as in "redistribute systems
programming power" doesn't make sense. If you mean you want to redistribute
decision making power with respect to linux kernel development or something
specific like that, that's entirely different.

