Rustaceans.ukOn Thursday, August 31, 2017, the London, Cambridge and Rome groups will all hold learning and hacking events around the same time. We will try to get in contact via video conferencing (using Google Hangouts) and inform each other on what we're doing.
During the evening we will all use the IRC channel #rustaceans.uk on irc.mozilla.org. Join it to see what's going on, and if you've got questions or have ideas or random thoughts, don't hesitate to speak up there! You can also always ask us organizers locally, and there will be the possibility to ask questions or show things across all groups via the video conferencing.
The London event is happening 6:30 to 9:00 PM (British time) at Code Node (Skills Matter). Please register with Skills matter here. This event is also on meetup.com.
pflanze), Mark (booyaa).The Rome event is happening 7:30 to 10:00 PM (Italian time) at Fusolab 2.0. Please register here.
wbigger), Enrico (IRC: wolf4ood).The Cambridge event is happening 6:30 to 9:00 PM (British time) at Cambridge Consultants. Please register for the event at meetup.com.
theJPster).Also see Mark's event report on users.rust-lang.org.
(by Christian)
For the London event, we had 22 final RSVPs on Meetup.com and 9 on Skills Matter, of which at least 7 overlapped (hence perhaps 24 total registrations). 12 people actually attended. The other locations had rather high numbers of participants, IIRC Cambridge did beat us, Rome perhaps as well.
The event went pretty well, the video conferencing worked without any real problems, our preparations and quite extensive testing before the event paid off. I was leading the video conferencing sessions, i.e. when we turned on sound (we left video running during the whole event), and passing 'the mic' to the other groups in turn. It was quite experimental, for me it was primarily learning how to best make use of the medium (and leading such events at all), I hope it will become more natural for me over time. There may also be better ideas on how to make use of the conferencing or how to organize the events, please don't hesitate to speak up.
5 of us worked on basic learning; we didn't group up but each worked on his own, although we did chat quite a bit with each other. Especially our mentor for the evening, Alessandro, was being asked quite a few questions and I think he was really helpful.
The groups working on projects seemed to have a good time and made some good progress. I did hand the microphone to some of them at the end to report on their status.
Mark had to leave earlier for his last train, but once on the train, he connected to the video channel over 4G and gave a remote demonstration of the Rust language server interaction he's been working on.
There was a problem with IRC on the mozilla network in that the server limited the number of connections that it allowed from our London location; TODO: still needs to be solved (Christian).
A proper mobile camera (better than the mobile phone, perhaps just a stand for it, make sure the battery lasts long enough, and figure out why it disconnected..) would be useful for walking around when giving people the microphone.