layout: post

title: "Core team membership updates"

author: The Rust Core Team

The Rust Core team is excited to announce the first of a series of changes to

its structure we’ve been planning for 2021, starting today by adding several new

members.

Originally, the Core team was composed of the leads from each Rust team.

However, as Rust has grown, this has long stopped being true; most members of

the Core team are not team leads in the project. In part, this is because Core’s

duties have evolved significantly away from the original technical focus. Today,

we see the Core team’s purpose as enabling, amplifying, and supporting the

excellent work of every Rust team. Notably, this included setting up and

[launching the Rust Foundation][launching].

[launching]: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-world/

We know that our maintainers, and especially team leads, dedicate an enormous

amount of time to their work on Rust. We care deeply that it’s possible for not

just people working full time on Rust to be leaders, but that part time

volunteers can as well. To enable this, we wish to avoid coupling leading a team

with a commitment to stewarding the project as a whole as part of the Core team.

Likewise, it is important that members of the Core team have the option to

dedicate their time to just the Core team’s activities and serve the project in

that capacity only.

Early in the Rust project, composition of the Core team was made up of almost

entirely Mozilla employees working full time on Rust. Because this team was made

up of team leads, it follows that team leads were also overwhelmingly composed

of Mozilla employees. As Rust has grown, folks previously employed at Mozilla

left for new jobs and new folks appeared. Many of the new folks were not

employed to work on Rust full time so the collective time investment was

decreased and the shape of the core team’s work schedule shifted from 9-5 to a

more volunteer cadence. Currently, the Core team is composed largely of

volunteers, and no member of the Core team is employed full time to work on

their Core team duties.

We know that it’s critical to driving this work successfully to have

stakeholders on the team who are actively working in all areas of the project to

help prioritize the Core team’s initiatives. To serve this goal, we are

announcing some changes to the Core team’s membership today: Ryan Levick,

Jan-Erik Rediger, and JT are joining the Core team. To give some context on

their backgrounds and experiences, each new member has written up a brief

introduction.

* [Ryan Levick](http://github.com/rylev) began exploring Rust in 2014 always

looking for more and more ways to be involved in the community. Over time he

participated more by co-organizing the Berlin Rust meetup, doing YouTube

tutorials, helping with various project efforts, and more. In 2019, Ryan got

the opportunity to work with Rust full time leading developer advocacy for

Rust at Microsoft and helping build up the case for Rust as an official

language inside of Microsoft. Nowadays he’s an active Rust project member with

some of the highlights including working in the compiler perf team, running

the Rust annual survey, and helping the 2021 edition effort.

* [Jan-Erik Rediger](https://github.com/badboy) started working with Rust

sometime in late 2014 and has been a member of the Rust Community Team since

2016. That same year he co-founded RustFest, one of the first conferences

dedicated to Rust. In the following years seven RustFest conferences have

brought together hundreds of Rust community members all around Europe and

more recently online.

* [JT](https://github.com/jntrnr) has 15 years of programming language

experience. During that time, JT worked at Cray on the Chapel programming

language and at Apple on LLVM/Clang. In 2012, they joined Microsoft as part

of the TypeScript core team, where they helped to finish and release

TypeScript to the world. They stayed on for over three years, helping direct

TypeScript and grow its community. From there, they joined Mozilla to work on

Rust, where they brought their experience with TypeScript to help the Rust

project transition from a research language to an industrial language. During

this time, they co-created the new Rust compiler error message format and the

Rust Language Server. Their most recent work is with Nushell, a programming

language implemented in Rust.

These new additions will add fresh perspectives along several axes, including

geographic and employment diversity. However, we recognize there are aspects of

diversity we can continue to improve. We see this work as critical to the

ongoing health of the Rust project and is part of the work that will be

coordinated between the Rust core team and the Rust Foundation.

[Manish Goregaokar](github.com/Manishearth) is also leaving the team to be able

to focus better on the dev-tools team. Combining team leadership with Core team

duties is a heavy burden. While Manish has enjoyed his time working on

project-wide initiatives, this coupling isn’t quite fair to the needs of the

devtools team, and he’s glad to be able to spend more time on the devtools team

moving forward.

The Core team has been doing a lot of work in figuring out how to improve how we

work and how we interface with the rest of the project. We’re excited to be able

to share more on this in future updates.

We're super excited for Manish’s renewed efforts on the dev tools team and for

JT, Ryan, and Jan-Erik to get started on core team work! Congrats and good luck!

*This post is part 1 of a multi-part series on updates to the Rust core team.*