TITLE: No Big Deal AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: December 29, 2018 4:41 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I love this line from Organizational Debt:

So my proposal for Rust 2019 is not that big of a deal, I guess: we just need to redesign our decision making process, reorganize our governance structures, establish new norms of communication, and find a way to redirect a significant amount of capital toward Rust contributors.

A solid understatement usually makes me smile. Decision-making processes, governance structure, norms of communication, and compensation for open-source developers... no big deal, indeed. We all await the results. If the results come with advice that generalizes beyond a single project, especially the open-source compensation thing, all the better. Communication is a big part of the recommendation for 2019. Changing how communication works is tough in any organization, let alone an organization with distributed membership and leadership. In every growing organization there eventually comes the time for intentional systems of communication:

But we've long since reached the point where coordinating our design vision by osmosis is not working well. We need an active and intentional circulatory system for information, patterns, and frameworks of decision making related to design.

I'm not a member of the Rust community, only an observer. But I know that the language inspires some programmers, and I learned a bit about its tool chain and community support a couple of years ago when an ambitious student used it successfully to implement his compiler in my course. It's the sort of language we need, being created in what looks to be an admirable way. I wish the Rust team well as they tackle their organizational debt and tackle their growing pains. -----