A few weeks ago I got up at 2:30am and attended virtual RustConf 2021. The pre-recorded talks were live-streamed and there was a dedicated Discord server for discussion and Q&A while the talks ran. It was overall well organised and a good experience. All the talks were interesting and well executed. The Discord chat was fun but I’m not sure it added a lot to the value of my experience.
I think if you had a talk that you were particularly interested in, being present for the conference and having direct access to the speaker might be valuable. Alternatively it seemed that for folks newer to the language the chat provided easy access to a lot of people to answer questions and provide explanations. With this in mind, in the future I think I’ll probably stick to watching the videos after they’re posted to YouTube (and not mess with my sleep). Having said that, they plan to return to an in-person conference (in Portland) next year.
My favourites were:
- Deadlocked by Mara Bos
- The Importance of Not Over-Optimizing in Rust by Lily Mara
- Identifying Pokémon Cards by Hugo Peixoto
- Hacking rustc: Contributing to the Compiler by Esteban Kuber
You can watch all the talks in the RustConf 2021 playlist on YouTube.
The best thing about Esteban’s talk may have been this exchange on Discord:
