Build a switchboard that allows people to find local interested Rust devs

[erickt]

Something like https://mozillians.org. http://rustaceans.org might be a good starting point

[erickt]

cc @nrc

[erickt]

The Rustaceans website code can be found here: https://github.com/nrc/rustaceans.org and here: https://github.com/nrc/rustaceans-src.

[nrc]

I'd be very happy if someone wanted to take ownership of rustaceans.org and do wonderful things with it. I don't have the time to really maintain or improve it, but it does seem to be getting some use.

[erickt]

@nrc: we'd be happy to take ownership over the project! Would you want to transfer the project to https://github.com/rust-community?

[nrc]

@erickt: sure, there are two repos, one for user data, and one for the source code. I'm currently hosting the backend (node.js) and frontend (simple HTML, served by Apache) and own the rustaceans.org domain. I'm happy to keep doing that, but if you want to make changes it will be a pain to get me to upload them, so it is probably best to at least host somewhere. Mozilla might be able to do that, not sure. Happy to transfer the domain if you want it too.

[aturon]

Mozilla can certainly host! We can coordinate with @edunham for our needs here.

[frewsxcv]

Considering all the data is stored in JSON, it might be the case that a backend might not be necessary (just using GitHub pages)

[edunham]

I've already started the conversation with @nrc about moving Rustaceans to Rust infrastructure. Hosting it as a static site would require some changes to how user search is architected; it might not be too hard for a community member with a stronger webdev background than mine.

Relatedly, do we want a Planet instance like planet.mozilla.org to aggregate posts by Rust bloggers?

[erickt]

@edunham: I'd like that someday. How comfortable would Mozilla be in non-employees developing and maintaining these services? Something like this wouldn't be that hard to run off of AWS / GCE, we'd just have to figure out that old "who pays for it" question :)

[nrc]

Any news here? rustaceans.org is getting a steady trickle of new users and could be made into something pretty good with a small amount of love. However, I'm reluctant to ask for contributions etc. with it being of slightly dubious offical-ness and amateurishly hosted.

[edunham]

@erickt, I believe Research is fine with handing out repo push access to non-employees and automatically deploying onto Moz-hosted resources (see r-l.o for an example of this), but less fine with handing out direct infrastructure access.

I looked at this today, PR'd some fix-ups to the rustaceans-src repo and chucked a copy of the front end onto rustaceans.rust-lang.org. Frontend currently runs using ncameron.org backend; next step is to debug hosting the rustaceans.r-l.o backend out of /var/www/rustaceans/backend and getting the Apache ProxyPass in 001 right (or maybe unblocking port 1235 somewhere?). @nrc will be at my office later this week so I'll bug him about it then.

[badboy]

As decided on today's meeting we will implement something in the following weeks. I'll take care of writing done something in the next days

[badboy]

Ok, I put down some notes from the meeting (yes yes, the meeting 4 weeks ago): http://pad.fnordig.de/p/rust-switchboard

I still want to get this going in the next few weeks.

[badboy]

An initial minimal extension of rustaceans.org is currently here: https://github.com/badboy/rustaceans-src/pull/3 It's not yet submitted upstream.