October 26, 2023

🦀 Rust Meetup @ Microsoft's Reactor Building

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a monthly meetup about the Rust programming language held at the Microsoft Reactor building, hosted by the Seattle Rust User Group.

"Brad G", who is also in the rotation for sending out the weekly Rust newsletter, was the emcee of the event and a wonderful host. He worked with an attendee who had brought a server PCB to do an impromptu presentation about the how and why of Rust running some of the embedded software of the board. The board is part of a design by Oxide for more turn-key cloud hardware solutions that seems innovative in design (even if not completely novel conceptually). I like what I'm learning about and will be watching how the company develops.

As the main talk of the event, Brad played a video walking though some of the functionality underlying the idea of .unwrap() in Rust. We touched on the cardinality of the return, the differences between the Result and Option types. I learned about unwrap_or... variations of .unwrap() which I was able to put into use the next day.

It was nice to have a familiar topic to start with, but the conversation eventually drilled down into aspects of computing theory I've had no previous exposure to. Borrowing the term from a good friend, I began understanding my "frontier of ignorance" with regard to Rust. This "frontier of ignorance" is an important concept in understanding how far you are on your journey relative to others. It wouldn't be exaggerating to say that I've barely taken a couple steps on my journey😅.

The Microsoft Reactor building at the event was very comfortable. Quiet, well lit, good infrastructure for a meetup. It was also very nostalgic for me due to its similarity to the offices I'd worked in at New Relic, HashiCorp, and Google, among the countless others I'd visited while in the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, I liked the display case with the legacy Microsoft products. As I mentioned on Mastodon, I've probably used half or more of them.

I liked the event well enough to return for next month's meetup.