# 2025-04-17 notes

## Agenda

* Check in -- what have we done so far? Upcoming interviews?
* Niko question: interfacing with larger orgs
* Countdown to the all hands, plan out what we will do by when
* Coding of data, any thoughts

## Attending

nikomatsakis, joshtriplett, nadri, jonbauman

## Notes

### Check in

joshtiplett: coordinating with nadri/jubilee to do self-interviews.

nikomatsakis: should we all interview/be-interviewed at lease once?

joshtriplett: yes but for practice, we know our own opinions

jonbaumann: tend to agree it's good for the practice. Not too concerned about making sure we get interviewed in terms of data collection, we will already have a big influence on what's in the document. In terms of what I did, I tried to put together a spreadsheet to let us colocate the survey responses with what we've planned and what we've done. From a PII perspective, I don't think the survey dump should live in Zulip. I've coordinated getting any updates to that data from Paul.

nikomatsakis: store in the google drive?

jonbaumann: I think that is more ephemeral, this is something we would want to keep longer term I expect?

joshtriplett: I had a question related to the video item. Obvs there are lots of tools we could use for doing the meetings, we tend to use jitsi, is there any integration of being able to get jitsi to do a recording.

nikomatsakis: I think jitsi *can* do it, but the one I used was in zoom.

nikomatsakis: I'd like to put everything in one place, e.g., google drive, then decide what we wil delete when are done at the end.

jonbauman: I didn't offer the foundation space but I think it'd be fine if we are all in one place. I think there's more sensitive PII in the survey and a lot more of it.

jonbauman: 800 gave consent to interview, and 200 mentioned C++, I plan to read them all. It's in google Sheets.

nadri: just been waiting for people to fill the lettucemeet so I can think about shadowing.

nikomatsakis: one thing I took away was that it is sometimes useful to have a comparison against other things -- e.g., think of something that was easy to learn and how did Rust compare?

joshtriplett: do you think of this as a thing to modify the script?

nikomatsakis: I thought it was more like a technique to bring in if people aren't being useful, but maybe framing the question as "what is something that worked well" and then asking "how did it go for you".

jonbauman: I imagine the experience of learning javascript is pretty different.

nikomatsakis: I'm not sure, the metadata lessons I took away were pretty general -- i.e., that learning materials and best practices should be aligned.

My status update: I've scheduled ~15 interviews for the next 3 weeks. A decent amount of coverage from Australia, Asia and Africa. Very light on large corp representation though.

### interfacing with larger orgs

nikomatsakis: I put out a call within Amazon for people who may not want to sign up for public data. I'm going to try and pick some of them out.

nikomatsakis: I don't think our script is quite calibrated for people representing an org. Maybe it's not "how did you get into Rust" but more like "how did your org get started with rust", etc?

joshtriplett: Sounds right, I think the more important questions are things we have direct experience with.

nikomatsakis: I think it'd be good to focus on their advocacy -- what are the obstacles they're hitting.

jonbauman: I wonder if those interviews will be more useful after we've done more of the IC discussions.

jonbauman: I can handle responses from Google. Less from Microsoft but I definitely have folks.

nikomatsakis: cool, I think the experience is largely similar, but I also know that the people who comment publicly or follow internet can be disjoint from people who use Rust in prod, so I'd like to correct for that.

## countdown to the all hands

* Apr 21 / nikomatsakis is on PTO
* josh/jubilee/nadri
* tim
* Apr 28
* Africa roundtable (Ernest)
* May 5
* LATAM roundtable (Ernest)
* May 12 -- bingo!
* Best we are going to do is collect a dozen+ interviews
* Plan:
* coordinate a time to do coding
* do live interviews, with conference participants?

## chatting

nikomatsakis: agree with you jon, let's focus on indiv devs for now and think about decision makers later.

nikomatsakis: sometimes it seems like there's a lot more rust than we think. othertimes less.

joshtriplett: yes, I've seen signs that the icebergs are deeper than we think. The other thing is that there is a perception that there is the set of Rust people who are heard from and the set that are disconnected from the community, project, etc. I think that b/c we've gotten large and can have complex dynamics I get the impression that there are people who despite our best efforts treat the project as a black box, the way we might treat the C standard. It's a fact of nature, we use Rust, but we couldn't possibly make sure it does better. I'm not sure if this comes from other languages where it's just not an option or what. I've definitely started to get the sensethat folks are not in the in-group.

jonbauman: "For every Rust Evangelism Strike Force member, there are 100 occult Rustaceans".

jonbauman: I remember when there was talk of doing metrics.

nikomatsakis: even within project we often treat things as read-only, Mara and I talked about having a session where we talk about the things we treat as fixed across teams.

nadri: our processes ARE suffering of scaling issues. I am reluctant to get an influx of contributors now. but let's fix it! come to my all-hands workshop

joshtriplett: if there's one thing we can get out of the all-hands, teams talking to each other and Mending The Bond is it.