Content-o-Tron

Helping the Rust community and newcomers to share their story of using Rust!

Welcome

This is the project repository for the process that will allow us to define and manage blogging themes (campaigns) that are Rust related.

This document (README.md) is your directory to all the possible facets of Content-o-Tron. You'll find out about the purpose, the team involved and more importantly how you can help!

• What are we doing?
• Who are we?
• What do we need?
• How can you can get involved?
• Get in touch
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Jargon buster

What are we doing? (And why are we doing it?)

TL;DR

This is a guide to organising a blogging campaign, in particular we are interested in people are new to long form writing. We try join new bloggers with people who can help edit the blog posts or advise about technical aspects of their blog post.

A better explanation

This project aims to formalise the process of generating Rust-focussed blog posts, while using a methodical way to gain repeat contributions.

Writing technical articles can sometimes feel daunting. Often an author will wait until they have spent a considerable time learning Rust before even considering sharing their experience. Even then, the act of sharing will often be done verbally with friends or as part of a meetup. Their unique insight isn't being shared with the wider Rust community.

Another reason that prevents prospective authors from writing is the thought that someone else will do it better than they could ever hope to achieve. (We don't believe this, but we understand that it can feel that way)

What's the plan?

We would like to help the community to produce better and more quality output by giving them a focal point. For that, we will regularly run campaigns. A campaign runs over multiple weeks and promotes a topic. While a campaign is running, everyone is encouraged to submit texts to it - those might be explanatory blog posts, tutorials or examples with explanations. The people running the campaigns will read through all that, help out with suggestions and then promote the material. How much we help out depends on your wishes. You're not a native english speaker and need someone to help out on that? We'll proof-read! You're good in english but don't know if your way of explaining can be improved? We'll give feedback!

The process is hands-off: there's not a high barrier of submission and the whole process is meant for improving and augmenting your output. We don't want to cause additional work, we want to help out and promote! If you don't need any of the editing support, but would just like to contribute things? Go ahead!

What Rust is?

Rust is an open source systems programming language, which is designed for writing highly reliable and fast system software in a simple way. Rust is focused on three goals: safety, speed, and concurrency. This means it prevents programs from crashing, runs blazingly fast, and ensures that all threads behave properly. You can read more about Rust here.

What type of blog posts are we talking about?

One of our best examples, is when the Rust team asked the entire community to help shape the programming language by write blog posts about what they would like to see in the Rust roadmap for 2018. The blog posts can be seen via readrust, which is a blog post aggregator.

Who are we?

Although this a Rust Content team project (sub-team of the Community team), it is open to the technology community.

What do we need?

We need you! If you've written blog posts (with or without Rust experience), editing other people's writing, or community managing, but even if you don't there may be other things you can help out with!

How can you get involved?

Our roadmap should outline what is going to happen, when it's going to happen and what type of help we're going to need. This is very much a work in progress, but please check on the roadmap often. We're still transferring a lot of information from our Open Canvas (adapted from the Lean Canvas which is a single page summary of a start-up project), but this along with the roadmap should give an idea of what we're trying achieve.

Attend our fortnightly meetings. You can find the next meeting via the Content team's meeting agenda.

Important note: you don't need to know anything about Rust to join.

Contact Us

If you can attend the meeting, feel free to add your query to the agenda. Alternatively you can ask a question in our gitter room.

Finally you can always raise an issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What is Rust?
  • A: Rust is a systems programming language, who's performance is comparable to C/C++, but whose memory and thread safety is similar to high level languages.
• Q: What is systems programming
  • A: This is tier below Application programming, in this area you would write device drivers, operating systems and cryptographic libraries.

Glossary

• Blog - shortened form of Weblog, originally a self hosted journal. Can also be the verb i.e. blogging - to write blog posts.
• Blogging platform - usually hosted by an internet company like Google (Blogger), Medium or WordPress (which can also be self hosted).
• Blog post - the smallest unit of data that can be posted on a blog.
• Microblogging - a short form of blogging made popular by social networks like Twitter.
• TL;DR - too long; didn't read.

Props / Thanks

• Mozilla Open Leaders programme (specifically Abby, Priyanka, Rob and the Cohort of Chaos aka Cohort C)
• Kristie Whitaker for her awesome STEMM Role Models repo, whose format (including issues) I shamelessly borrowed heavily from.
• The Rust Community team for their continued help and support.