Retrospective: Rust Cologne in January

Last monday, 8th of January, we had the first Rust Cologne meetup this year. We opted for a Open Space-style meetup, allowing for broad discussion rounds in small groups, which worked reasonably well this time (it's the second time we did it). More on that later.

News

We usually start off the meeting with a short round of news since the last meetup (usually 4-6 weeks). This time we did it a bit adhoc:

  1. Rust 1.23 was released
  2. Diesel 1.0 was released
  3. NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) are in nightly
  4. Call for #Rust2018 community input

Open Space

Open Space follows 4 simple principles:

  1. Whoever comes are the right people.
  2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
  3. When it starts is the right time.
  4. When it's over, it's over.

This time around we had a couple of new attendees, which is very encouraging for everyone involved. With a dozen people around, we managed to have between two and four concurrently running small discussion rounds.

We collected some topics upfront:

Obviously, I was not able to take part in all discussions, but I collected some rough notes from the things I was in. In the following are some rough notes regarding each topic. There are not necessarily clear outcomes of the discussions or steps to take.

Learning Rust

With a couple beginners and some more seasoned Rustaceans around, we discussed what it takes to learn Rust, (missing) material and projects.

In the end this discussion spun off into the embedded discussion and I left.

Tokio / async programming

Rust for the Web


After 3 hours of lively discussions we brought the evening to an end. This was (most likely) my last meetup as an official part of the organizer team. Plans for the February meetup are started and I might join that one again if I'm around. Please jump into the conversation and propose ideas, talks or projects!

Thanks to Colin (who also left the organizer team, but took care of invitations for the January meetup one last time), Pascal & Florian.