Hello, I'm John, my name's John Knapp, I am the sole person at a company called Coffee & Code. Hi, nice to meet you, I'm from Akron, Ohio. So I'm gonna tell you about RustBridge, or how to run your own RustBridge. Quick show of hands, anybody here have any like bridge events before?

Very small amount of people, cool, well, that's okay. So a little bit about me. So I know about nil in Rust, that's a joke, I actually know none in Rust. Thank you, one person is awake, woo, that was like the best joke, okay, thank you. So I'm lying, I have a little bit of knowledge in Rust, but I actually don't have a whole

lot. So I am a web developer by trade, I do a lot of consulting work, but Rust hasn't found its way into my production workflow very quickly, I would say, and so I get to play with it in my spare time, but during the hours of work, it's kind of not seen or adding into my knowledge. But I'm very intrigued. I'm also busy, I have two small kids at home, yay kids, and everything that comes with them.

But so what I wanted to do was try and find examples of ways to learn more Rust, or force myself to learn more Rust, and I found this RustBridge.com. So RustBridge is a, it's focused, it's trying to be a one-day workshop to focus

on getting underrepresented people with backgrounds in potentially another programming language and trying to get them exposed to Rust and then maybe help them kind of learn some more resources to kind of continue their learning. And so the really cool thing that comes with this is they have a ton of repositories and a ton of information and a ton of ways to make it extremely easy for somebody

who has very close to no knowledge in the language itself to be able to teach other people that language. So everything is there. You get an intro to Rust, materials as well as presenter notes, so how to talk about different things. So it's a brief introduction to trying to compare and contrast some concepts that you would see in other programming languages.

There's information for organizers about how to find attendees, about how to find a venue. It references the Rust code of conduct, but it also makes it very clear and to the point that these are things that are important and that you should bring to your event right off the bat. As well as some sample applications that you can build as a group. So you have the introduction to Rust usually as about the first half of the day and then

you can come back in the second half of the day and do something a little bit meatier with the new knowledge that people have gained. So what did I do? Well first step is I found some other organizers because I needed some people to keep me accountable or else I would have just dropped off. So I started using Trello for organizing different kind of tasks. We started meeting possibly every week just in the evenings remotely.

Found a venue and was able to put down some cash to lock that down. Ordered some cool stickers that look like this. So I am from the Northeast Ohio area so I did a Cleveland Rust Bridge. Created a PDF for bulletin boards.

So this is something that I probably wouldn't have thought of right away but somebody else recommended it to me. So universities like to print things and put it somewhere for students to look at. And so having just like a little one pager is a really nice way to kind of bring in some people. We got some K students this way. Try to find some sponsors. Used Google Forms for registration and follow up surveys.

And then we actually internally as we were planning this with the other organizers we built some custom kind of applications to play around with that we would then use as teaching material for the second half of the workshop. So again forcing myself to learn things that I wanted to learn for the sake of teaching it to other people who were potentially interested as well.

We then did some trial runs of the material and kind of talked about our notes in the beginning so we didn't look like fools when we talked to people in front of them during the workshop day. And how did it go? Well we got a really good turnout. We got some interesting feedback. People really enjoyed the content. We got this back so it says the presenters were more than qualified to teach the language

so I had no problem asking them a million and one question so this is just a quote from one of the people. Again I had very very very very little knowledge in Rust itself and so I hope that you can use this as a motivation that if you are interested in trying to make some more people interested in Rust in your local community that you could think about this as potentially doing a workshop yourself.

And you can find more information at rettridge.com or feel free to ask me some questions. Thank you.