Last year, HackIllinois introduced the open-source college hackathon. Our primary goal was to support student developers in giving back to the open-source community.
Our event offered two tracks. In the Create Track, we guided students towards the creation of new, maintainable projects. In the Contribute Track, we connected students with the maintainers of existing popular open-source projects, encouraging them to learn about these projects and become contributors themselves throughout the weekend.
For many of our attendees, work on their projects didn’t stop when our event came to an end. We’ve watched as the projects and contributions that started at HackIllinois have matured. Today, we’d like to share some of the amazing work our attendees have done in the six months that followed HackIllinois 2017.
This feature is the third part of a three part series detailing some of the projects that have kept on going after HackIllinois 2017. Read about our Long Con winners here:
Rust Cookbook
We’re happy to announce that the winner of the Long Con for the Create track is Rust Cookbook. The Rust Cookbook is a project is to help acclimate users to the Rust language with some tangible code examples, as well as showcase various libraries created by the Rust community. This project provides one location for all of these materials to be put together, allowing beginners to have an easier time starting with Rust.
Hugh Harris, Trenton Spice, Ben Collins, Brad Anderson, along with Brian Anderson and Alex Crichton, two members of the Mozilla Rust team, worked during HackIllinois to start this project, creating code examples and the format for future contributions to the cookbook. At the time of project submission, the Cookbook held 10 code samples and a couple of different Rust libraries, although that number has grown drastically since!
Once the project was officially launched after HackIllinois, it blew up, and now has 44 contributors and 434 commits, and was featured by the official Rust blog as one of the largest achievements of 2017 among the Rust community. In that blog post, the Cookbook was put forward as one of the best way to drive community adoption of Rust and encouraged people to contribute toward the Cookbook.
Since the project was started, there have been countless readers of the Cookbook, and this project has made a big impact on the Rust language and its community, helping Rust become more prevalent.
However, there’s still more work to be done. Whether it’s adding examples for the many cutting-edge Rust libraries being developed, or refining the current code snippets, contributions are always welcome. Rust is a fast growing language and to fit this demand, the team is looking to get more people involved and increase awareness about the project. The goal is to get featured on the official Rust documentation once the Cookbook has matured enough.
Congratulations again to the HackIllinois Rust Cookbook team!