After what seemed like an eternity, we finally had another meetup. I almost decided not too because I couldn't get any speakers (you may recall my previous post on URLO).
In the end I decided to do a talk, which whilst not technically heavy would mean we’d have a meetup so the Rustaceans to meet and rusticate.
Luckily I'd just started doing a deep dive into static site generators and decided to talk about them.
Now onto a small digression about my performance…you can skip the next 4 paragraphs if you want…
The talk went well enough, you can see it here. I had small bout of nerves and clung onto my speaker notes more than I should've. Thankfully I had already whittled them down to just keywords otherwise I really think I would've started reading off my notes.
Incidentally I was using my iPhone as a keynote remote and you can configure it to also show your notes. I think this may have contributed to me staring at the phone too much. Well that's what it looks like in the video .
For future talks I will buy a separate clicker and keep the notes on the laptop.
During the talk it looks like I had a few front end devs in the audience because they nodded at the right time. Sadly no questions at the end, I still use this as a measure of how engaged the audience were.
Welcome back if you skipped!
Despite the lack of engagement, there was a bit of silver lining. I finally worked out how to keep the group talking - do not dismiss after the talks have ended!
Previously, after ending the talks I would shepard the group away from the room where the talks were held into the main social area. Our venue, Code|Node has a nice open area that has a bar, table tennis and loud music (you getting the picture now?). None of these are helpful when you're trying to nurture conversation between strangers.
After a few minutes, small knots of Rustaceans formed and started to talk. I stayed for another hour, but it really did warm my heart watching people talk about rusty things! I can't wait for next month's meetup (got a speaker lined up this time).
And so now dear reader, you've reached the end of my tale, I have some questions that my group asked and hope you can help answer.
- Can you use Rust w/o cargo or perhaps cargo without the internet? One of our attendees is stuck behind a firewall (using any form of proxy isn’t permitted). They would like to download a tar ball (from the crates' repo) and compile them. How would dependencies work? Could we shrink wrap the dependencies externally and the copy the result into the restricted network?
- Are there any helpful resources for Java devs to learn Rust? Bonus if it's gamedev or GUI related!
- Can dogs look up? Joke, just testing to see who would read this far!
