I'm using it as one particular proxy for "I used to be able to keep tabs on everything. I am no longer able to keep tabs on everything." I tried to get at this with the change to talking about github notifications, but maybe could have spelled it out directly.
Not sure if you'll see this, but Steve, you've done wonders for the Rust community over the years. Rust would never be the language that it is today without your amazing work, so I (and I'm sure many others) are extremely grateful for all that you've done. Congratulations on this bittersweet milestone, and thanks again!
Note that the events of this post happened and were happening before I left Mozilla. I wasn’t let go; I quit. And I’m not upset about it at all; I feel very positive about my future.
To respond to your edit, if anything, my work has been over appreciated, since I’m often the one who is communicating externally. The success of Rust has a lot more to do with others than me; that’s the nature of working on a team with over 100 people, and thousands over a project’s history.
How do you feel about the current employability of Rust, for high-skilled developers?
I helped grow a different fringe/innovative language platform and community. I'm recently doing Rust instead, partly because I'm very sympathetic to it, and it suits some kinds of server and applications programming I've done. And partly because Rust seems more employable, without being considered as commoditized a skill as some other languages I considered.
It’s never been better. I will say there’s a lot of blockchain, so that may be a pro or con, depending on how you feel about that. It’s hard to quantify; I got a lot of inbound, and did basically no external research, but I’m special. I know several Rust shops that didn’t get in touch, and that’s fine. It’s not as easy as “go on monster and pick from a wealth of jobs” and many have location requirements, that can limit options. It did mine. I’m fine with that though.
A lot of technology decisions are easier to justify to management with “look an how $BIGCO uses this technology.” And now that we’re seeing the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, several unicorns, and the like, using Rust, I think it’s gonna keep growing. Those usages aren’t as widely known yet, outside of the hacker news crowd.
What about for junior developers? I'm thinking of picking up Rust as my first language and was wondering what my professional prospects might be in the future.
Rust as a first language only works if you're willing to really put a lot of work in; there's no resources specifically for that. It can be done, but it's also harder than a language like Python or Ruby, which have those specific resources available.
That's what next-level success looks like! It's one thing to imagine something and create it; it's another thing to imagine something bigger than yourself, share the vision, draw people together, and create it as a group; it's yet another thing, a longer, slower, more difficult, and ultimately bittersweet form of success, to support the growth of a community organized around a vision until the point that it can leave you behind. It takes some wisdom to let go at the appropriate pace and step away at the appropriate moment. Congratulations on getting to this point.
Thank you! I am not stepping away fully, just acknowledging my limitations and putting more focus into less things. I’ll still be doing some docs and doing core team work for the foreseeable future.
I'm glad to hear it. I did not mean to diminish your involvement; my hope was to echo back some appreciation of the challenge involved in allowing a thing to grow by releasing it. I hope your work continues to thrive.
Job postings are a lagging indicator of a language momentum, because successful products - which belong to companies that employ many people - were built years ago and will probably keep using the same tech stack as long as possible.
Thank you for your contributions to the Rust ecosystem over the years! I've tinkered with many novel programming languages over the years, and most of those come and go, but Rust is one of the ones I stick with. Rust is the first programming language I have encountered that shows that linear (affine) logic is more than just another PLT or mathematical logic curio that is a practical tool for good software engineering, and that systems programming can have the trappings of type safety and ergonomics just like its application counterparts. Best of luck on your next transition.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] threadEDIT: Or, "Look all I did for the rust community, my work was not appreciated enough and can't get over it."
To respond to your edit, if anything, my work has been over appreciated, since I’m often the one who is communicating externally. The success of Rust has a lot more to do with others than me; that’s the nature of working on a team with over 100 people, and thousands over a project’s history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I helped grow a different fringe/innovative language platform and community. I'm recently doing Rust instead, partly because I'm very sympathetic to it, and it suits some kinds of server and applications programming I've done. And partly because Rust seems more employable, without being considered as commoditized a skill as some other languages I considered.
A lot of technology decisions are easier to justify to management with “look an how $BIGCO uses this technology.” And now that we’re seeing the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, several unicorns, and the like, using Rust, I think it’s gonna keep growing. Those usages aren’t as widely known yet, outside of the hacker news crowd.
We’ll see!
(I got far away from blockchain several years ago. :)