Rust presentation ideas

community
1

I'm in the process of presenting rust to my company at our companies hosted dev conference.

Any tips/tricks/jedi mind tricks that you could recommend? What I'm to talk about has been left pretty open ended. (I'll later post the slide deck when I've finalized, but mostly I'm just trying to figure out how I want to go forward.)

2

I'd recommend comparing the speed of rust mdBook to gitBook :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with the presentation,

might be something you'd want to check out.

5 Likes
4

First draft of the slides. Thoughts?
slides

5

Slides are private.

6

My mistake, should be public now.

7

You should mention intellij-rust. It's really good and looks nice in screenshots :wink:

Also Intellij IDEA is really enterprise-friendly and can be used for many things other than Rust.

2 Likes
8

Nice going so far!

This is a topic dear to my heart, so please allow me to overwhelm you with links and opinions :smiley:

My personal strategy when evangelizing is always to casually mention how Rust provides business value. It sounds corny, but I've learned it's essential to get buy-in from the higher-ups, so that they'll allow me to use my fancy toy on company time :slight_smile:

For example: On (or after) slide 6 ("memory safety"), you might want to include a bit of text on how this provides business value.

  • Memory safety means no strange, hard-to-debug race conditions, that cost an unpredictable amount of (expensive!) developer-hours, on a Friday, after 16:00.., while blocking the release of the new version to paying customers.
  • Memory safety means less/no-more embarrassing buffer-overflow, use-after-free and double-free bugs, a distressing amount of which end up as security nightmares on the CVE lists; (well-publicized example: heartbleed)
    Especially if you have European customers, the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation means that leaking personal data as a result of such bugs can incur fines of up 4% of annual, global turnover ("monetary business risk reduced by rust!").

I also agree with @tjamaan on the 'intellij-rust' namedrop; my entire department is addicted to that editor, and I've had a colleague literally say "if Rust has an intellij plugin, that means it's finally becoming a usable language"

Depending on your personal interactivity level in your talk: to convince the developers in the room, maybe ask the crowd "who is happy debugging dependencies?" (should show ~0 hands), before gushing about Cargo :wink:

Depending on your companies existing codebase, the great C-interop ( rusty cheddar, bindgen) might deserve a mention.
@carols10cents has a nice slide-deck on how to incrementally port the C Zopfli compression lib to rust that may be an inspiration. "incremental" is important, because it incurs less business risk than "flag days" or massive "rewrites from scratch". See also how Mozilla is integrating servo-bits piece-by-piece into firefox (project quantum), instead of just saying "Firefox is dead, long live Servo!".

Maybe also browse the Rust Friends directory for some production users, as evidence for maturity. My personal favourites are cloud-provider OVH, who build their integrated logging pipeline on Rust (arguably business critical), DropBox (who built their entire storage backend in rust for both cost-savings and reliability) and SkyLight (who sell Ruby server monitoring agents, and Rust allows them to never break the customer's server).

4 Likes