Rust
Rust is a modern systems programming language that emphasizes memory safety and safe concurrency.
I was an early Rust adopter since a little before 2014, back when Rust was in a constant state of flux, as the language hadn’t been finalized for the first stable release.
At a minimum I was very active in adapting Rust ecosystem packages to the latest syntax and semantics incurred by RFCs which I read voraciously.
I was known to the Rust core team as an early adopter and contributor to the Rust ecosystem. The team knew I was working on a static site generator which drove me to:
- contribute to many diverse libraries I needed for my project
- build solutions myself to fill gaps in the nascent Rust ecosystem
- report Rust compiler bugs that I often discovered by using bleeding-edge nightly features
- provide helpful usability feedback
- provide support to other early adopters by answering questions on StackOverflow, IRC, and so on
During the crunch leading up to the 1.0 release, the file system module std::fs and the file path module std::path were being redesigned and Rust core developers specifically reached out to me for my opinions and feedback on their proposals at certain points [1][2], since they knew me to be an active user of those APIs.
Immediately after the redesign was actually implemented, I identified a subtle edge-case that was not accounted for and quickly fixed it in time for the 1.0 release. Although the change is trivial, it is a culmination of:
- being noticed by Rust core developers as an early, widespread adopter of and contributor to the Rust ecosystem
- Rust core developers specifically reaching out to me for my insight
- very closely following Rust’s development to learn of bleeding edge features
- using bleeding edge features barely introduced by RFCs
- knowing “where” to mark the “X”, so to speak