RustFest Rome 2018 Workshops

RustBridge is an all-day workshop focused on getting underrepresented people with a background in another programming language to learn Rust and join the community. In this workshop we’ll get you up and running with a Rust development environment, introduce you to Rust syntax and programming concepts, and work together to build a small website that you can personalize, extend, and share!
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Want to parse some JSON? How about a Lisp? Or maybe Yet Another Another Markup Language? Whatever the motivation, we got you covered! We will work with a very small language with a grammar written in Pest (which is amazing!), try to understand what it’s doing, and see if we can make a hand-written(-ish) parser from scratch that is faster then the Pest-based one. Then we will look through some ways to make that even faster.

You will learn:

• That benchmarking your code and making it faster is a lot of fun!
• Scary words like Lexer, Tokenizer and Abstract Syntax Tree.
• That somewhat tedious and boring looking code can occasionally be the one that runs fastest.
• How to get rid of that somewhat tedious and boring code without losing performance.
• How to stop worrying and love ASCII.
• How to construct mostly allocation-free recursive tree structures.
• How to leverage C-like strings in (mostly) safe Rust.

This workshop is for you if:

• You are somewhat familiar with Rust, but came from a garbage collected language like JavaScript or Python and haven’t quite yet figured out how all this memory management business really works.
• By some weird accident you believe, like I do, that writing parsers is really fun.
• You have no idea about any of this, but are curious and want to learn.

Multiprocessor programming is a big mystery to many people. This is an introduction workshop for beginners explaining different modes on execution and then use channels to develop a multi-platform, parallel thumbnail generator.

Using the crates ThreadPool and rayon we will learn how easy it is to parallelize workloads with rust.

Join Yann (Founder, 1aim), Hoverbear (Engineer, PingCAP) and fellow attendees in an ad-hoc space to present and discuss your latest research and experiments in the fields of networking, radio, routing/infrastructure, chaos testing, service discovery, encoding, monitoring, instrumentation, and distributed computing.

How do Tokio reactors work? What are the pitfalls of UTF-8? What are useful design patterns for transactional requests? How can we greater leverage futures? How can we ensure our system behaves as we expect? How can we feel comfortable destroying database nodes in production? How do IMAP and SMTP work anyways?

You are encouraged to bring less than 15 minutes worth of content, a project, or a research paper you find interesting. All attendees will be invited to both ask for a topic to be covered, and present on any topic of interest to the group. Participation is voluntary, of course.

Together, let’s architect the future.

In this workshop we will go through the basics of using the GTK+ UI toolkit and the GStreamer multimedia framework from Rust. A small webcam desktop application will be written during the course of the workshop, which will allow to view the video from the webcam, take snapshots and record videos, possibly with effects.
If you’re interested in either of the two technologies and how to use them from Rust then this is the workshop for you.
Basic Rust knowledge is a requirement for this workshop and participants should bring a laptop with a webcam, running Linux, macOS, or Windows, or pair with another participant on their laptop.

Rust is often touted as a fast language, but the Rust compiler isn’t magic. Although Rust enables and encourages an efficient style of programming, sometimes you need to dig deep and worry about the low-level details of your code. This workshop will teach you how to get the most out of your programs, without resorting to unsafety.

While Rust and its ecosystem has some shining examples of great documentation, there’s still a lot to do. So let’s spread the word how to improve all our crates’ docs. Because they deserve it.
This is a “bring your own crate” workshop, so please select a crate you want to document or improve documentation on. For those undecided, I will maintain a list of “docs wanted” crates during the talks day to distribute crates randomly.