The Habitat team attended and sponsored 2/3 of the major conferences for the Rust Lang community this year. The most recent being the first annual Rust Belt Rust Conference in Pittsburgh, PA on October 27th and 28th! Some of you might notice when reading those dates: this was only two days after the Habitat Community Summit. So, Suffice to say it was a busy week for the team, but also totally worth it! As was the case with RustConf, it was extremely fun to get to know more of the lovely rustaceans from the Rust community. We are super looking forward to next year’s event!
Habitat
While Habitat isn’t the only Rust project happening at Chef, it is absolutely the largest. It currently sits at around 30,000 lines of Rust and its barely even a year old. Which means, we’ve still got room to grow. While the Rust language was chosen for a multitude of technical reasons (including and certainly not limited to: abstraction without overhead, memory safety without garbage collection, and concurrency without data races), one of the things we couldn’t have foreseen was how closely the community culture of Rust aligns with what we want for Habitat and to a greater Degree, Chef.
In fact, the way the Rust community is managed and handled is so inline with what we believe about community on the Habitat team, we totally plan to learn from the way they’re operating. What this means is, in the coming months we’re likely to implement some community interaction that mirrors theirs. This is really one of the beautiful things about community building around FOSS projects, we get to learn together!
Rust Belt Rust
At Rust Belt Rust, there were some really excellent workshop sessions and a wonderful lineup of speakers and topics. It was invigorating to meet face-to-face with some of the Community engineers who’ve written crates that have been so helpful to our codebase (Clap, Iron, etc.). We left feeling even more content with our decision on Rust.
We’re really excited for the future of the Rust Community and will be involved in as many Rust events as we possibly can going forward. I’d also like to take another opportunity to thank all of the Rust Community team for an excellent and successful event. It was an awesome time.
Get Involved
Are you interested in getting involved in our Rust code? Here are some ideas for getting started!