Introduction

Steve Klabnik is a member of the Rust core team, an active open source contributor, and author of The Rust Programming Language, Rails 4 in Action, and Designing Hypermedia APIs books. In 2012 and 2016, we invited Steve to speak at the RailsClub (now RubyRussia) conference. Since then, Steve has been working on Rust a lot, did a lot of interesting things and we realized that we should definitely interview him once again!

We sat down with Steve to hear from him first-hand about his professional activities at the moment, the design success of Rust, a little about the “full-stack” development hype, and overcoming burnouts.

The Interview

Evrone: Besides your open source contributions, what are your professional activities at the moment?

Steve: I work at Oxide Computer Company, writing a bunch of Rust code!

Evrone: Are there any other technologies other than Ruby and Rust that you find interesting?

Steve: Rust is my focus at the moment, but I’m very interested in the rise of “headless CMS”es and JAMStack.

Evrone: You spent a lot of time hunting for theorycraft beasts to create top-notch documentation for Rust developers. Looking back at the language evolution, what do you think is the main design success that added the most to the language popularity?

Steve: The biggest thing was wanting to be useful. We tried to be familiar as much as possible, so that the few new ideas could get the focus. Rust isn’t afraid to be imperfect, as long as we ship something useful.

Evrone: What is your favorite software toolset for everyday work?

Steve: I use Visual Studio Code, with the vim plugin.

#rust