Reflections on the disproportionate contributions to the Rust community by a handful of people

The recent announcement by Character_Infamous about the Rust 2021 book prompted me to think about how there are people who contribute to Rust, its success, and the Rust community in ways other than technical content or the usual service in formal technical roles (on committees, in leadership, etc.). Our technical communities don't have any metrics to measure this other kind of contribution I am talking about, and so they often go unacknowledged—or at least grossly under-acknowledged. I don't know if there is a way to correct for this, but I do know that I can call out good work that I have seen myself. So that's what I'm going to do. If you know of other people who deserve acknowledgment, I would love to hear about them in the comments.

u/steveklabnik1 is a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is. Steve Klabnik is not just really brilliant, he's super generous with his time, has a talent for exposition, demonstrates exceptional political acumen, and consistently displays charity and compassion in his interactions in online conversations that are notorious for being fraught with emotional toxicity and misunderstanding. Contributing the amount of technical "product" that Steve has easily earns him a special place in the community by itself. But these other intangibles are also contributions that I believe have enriched the community immeasurably, and I have no doubt anyone who contributes as he has does so at significant cost to themselves in terms of time and intellectual and emotional energy.

And I imagine that people like Steve might feel like Sisyphus. It is easy to see how contributing so much without acknowledgment, much less reward, might carry an invisible psychological cost that is hard to bear. Steve clearly has tremendous technical talent, but for my part, I am more interested in being more like Steve in these ineffable ways. Thank you, my internet friend!

I can't help but think also of u/burntsushi, whose technical achievements rival that of anyone's within the community—or outside of it, for that matter. Am I jealous of his technical accomplishments? No, of course not, but also, definitely yes. I've learned a lot of very technical computer science from Andrew both directly and indirectly. Behind the scenes, he has served in various ways as a moderator, and unless you were paying attention you wouldn't know the extent to which he brings his political and ethical wisdom and compassion to both his technical work and his contributions to technical discussion. He shares Steve's talent for displaying charity and compassion in online conversation even when other participants become—\*ahem\*—unpleasant. I don't know, but I suspect that Andrew is the kind of person who prefers to contribute "behind the scenes" rather than in positions of visible leadership. But he's also the kind of person who, whether he likes it or not, others naturally follow. This is the curse of competent, effective people. What I admire about Andrew, and what I seek to emulate in my own work, is the way in which the impact on other human beings is never absent from rigorous technical analysis, whether it looks that way or not. For lack of a better phrase, and without intending the theological connotations it might evoke in some readers, Andrew has provided an invaluable moral leadership to the community to a degree few other people have.

One last thing I want to say about community members who serve the community to a disproportionate degree, without reference to any particular single person: It can be very hard on them. If you detect dissatisfaction or cynicism in one of our thought leaders, that may be more a consequence of their own accumulated psychological burden than a symptom of dysfunction in the community as a whole. Let them be fragile human beings like all of the rest of us are. Encourage them to take time off. Allow them to say stupid or clumsy things sometimes. We might hold them to a higher standard, but chances are good that they hold themselves to an even higher standard still, likely a standard no mortal person can meet. For extremely driven people, the effects of praise can be very short lasting. I think we all need a reminder sometimes that those who have already given us so very much are also those from whom we demand the most despite being precisely those people from whom we have the least right to demand anything at all. Maybe we can tell them, and tell ourselves, that they don't owe us anything—in fact the opposite is true, we owe them so much, and thank them for that, and remind them that they can take a break and just be for a while.