Community Grants Program Awards Announcement

Overview #

The Rust Foundation is pleased to announce the awards of the 2022 Rust Foundation Fellowship Program, and the first tranche of the 2022 Project Grants Program.

As many of you know by now, the Community Grants Program is a mechanism to provide funds to the Rust development community to support their work. There will be at least 21 Fellowships and 20 Project grants awarded. We are particularly pleased that grants will be awarded across the globe, with grant recipients spread across 15 countries, with approximately 35% beyond the United States and Western Europe.

The Rust Fellowship award recognises long term contributors to the Rust Project, as well as newer ‘Associate Fellow’ entrants to the maintainer community looking to increase their contributions and skills in order to develop into the Rust leaders of the future. Rust Fellows are sponsored for one year to work on key priority Rust development. Alongside a monthly stipend to support the time they devote to Rust maintenance, Fellows will also receive a program of training, networking, and the opportunity to attend Rust-related events. Fellows and Project grant recipients will be working across the Rust ecosystem, with several focusing on language maintenance and improvement work, documentation, libraries, and learning materials.

The Project Grant awards focus on specific pieces of work, which are time-limited, and clearly deliver a significant benefit to a reasonable proportion of the Rust community. Awards were made in three categories of project focus: Maintenance and Support, Development and Infrastructure, and Community.

The Rust Foundation received more than 60 applications for funding across the two grant streams. The successful awards represent investment in the maintenance and development of key areas of the Rust ecosystem, and we hope that this will mean tangible benefits for Rust users and maintainers alike, and an improved Rust landscape for all.

A full list of the Fellowship and Project awards by GitHub ID is available below. More details about the grantees and their work (including potential additional grantees and the values of the project grant awards) will be published on our website shortly.

Thank you to our Expert Advisors! #

We are enormously grateful to a number of individuals that took on the role of ‘Expert Advisors’ to the Program in the course of assessing the applications submitted. The technical expertise that they provided means that we are very confident that the work being conducted through the awards will be relevant, high quality, impactful and will not place undue burden on existing maintainers.

A full list of the Expert Advisors is available below.

Learning lessons for the future #

We have learned a lot of lessons through this first iteration of the Community Grants Program, and as we have committed to doing all along, will likely tweak some of the processes for our next application window. We are proud of how this first application period has developed, but it was never going to be 100% perfect on the first try, and we want to make improvements for next time. We haven't landed on all of the specifics yet (we still have a lot of admin to do on the current awards first!), but we will definitely revisit some of the information, requirements and administration features.

We were also struck by the number of applicants or potential applicants that expressed extreme reservations about their own skills, to the point of not applying because they didn't think it was worth it. We think it is worth noting that, on a number of these applications, our Expert Advisors provided glowing feedback, and those applicants were ultimately successful. We hope that we can provide more encouragement next time around to ensure that people with great skills know it is worth applying.

Hardship Grants and Events Grants are live year-round #

A quick reminder that these two grant streams are open for applications 24/7. You can find more information here.

Expert Advisors #

• adamgreig
• epage
• yaahc
• m-ou-se
• nellshamrell
• nikomatsakis
• oli-obk
• flip1995
• rylev
• sgrif
• Mark-Simulacrum

Fellowship Awards #

• anshulrgoyal: Supporting the Rust community through Rust Project based documentation improvements, bug fixes and educational blogs.
• Turbo87: Improvements to crates.io, including website design and presentation, reducing the number of issues and pull requests and growing the crates.io team.
• ouz-a: Supporting the Rust Compiler Team through improved documentation, technical improvements and resolving GitHub issues. In addition, creating educational content to support new Rust project contributors.
• jackh726: Co-leading and supporting the Traits Working Group including organization, code review and mentoring. In addition, implementing various Rust Project technical features, particularly around Chalk and the Rust Compiler.
• ChrisDenton: Improving the Windows implementation of the Rust Standard Library.
• Moxinilian: Supporting the Rust Project Roadmap pertaining to the compiler in order to build experience and grow as a compiler contributor and mentor. In addition, improving documentation for under-served project areas.
• tshepang: Improving and updating the Rust Compiler Developer Guide with a view to help future contributors and growing to potentially join the Rust Compiler team in the future.
• b-naber: Working with the Rust Project Language Team and the Const-Generics Working Group to advance the const-generics implementation and roadmap.
• csmoe: Addressing Rust code generation, specifically improving metrics, addressing open issues and implementing optimizations and new Code Generation Unit algorithm.
• doc-jones: Continuing to develop the Rust Contributor Program, the RFC which can be found at https://mojosd.medium.com/rustc-reading-club-draft-rfc-a32b16f803bf
• jannic: Providing better support for Rust on the 2040 microcontroller and improving the current state of Rust packages on Debian.
• flip1995: Maintaining Clippy, which helps catch common Rust code mistakes and improve Rust code, through improvements and advancing the Clippy roadmap.
• WaffleLapkin: Improving the Rust compiler and its diagnostics, and contributing to the Rust standard library and tooling. In addition, providing educational support for learning Rust.
• DebugSteven: Improving the standard library, including working with the Rust Library Team to identify and resolve high priority issues, and specifically looking to starndardize the interface for string types.
• Alexendoo: Supporting Clippy through reviewing pull requests, fixing bugs and contributing technical improvements.
• Muscraft: Supporting Cargo, specifically working to reduce the amount of work it takes to maintain Cargo.
• jhpratt: General support and improvements of the Rust Project including around default value fields, coercion, traits and package libraries.
• me-diru: Contributing to and learning from various Rust Project teams, and helping develop the Rust community in India through outreach.
• m-ou-se: Overall support of the Rust Project through various Team leading and participation, fostering a successful work and collaboration environment.
• BoxyUwU: Working with the Rust Project Language Team and the Const-Generics Project Group, along with wg-traits, to advance core language feature implementation and roadmap.

Individual Project Grant Awards #

• sunface: Expanding the outreach of Rust in China through Rust developer courses, increasing community engagement, and written content.
• folyd: Maintaining the Rust Search Extension and a documentation tool called Zine.
• CAD97: Creating an improved tracing framework and language for Rust debugging and formally proposing and implementing a new Storage API.
• m-ou-se: Focusing on the organizing and management of the Rust Library teams.
• ChrisDenton: Improving file path handling on Windows and their use with filesystem APIs.
• miguelraz: Writing a Rust-oriented SIMD (Single Instruction/Multiple Data) book.
• xFrednet: Creating a stable linting API that enables every Rust project to create custom lints.
• hkmatsumoto: Working on an LLVM JIT backend for the Rust MIR (Mid-level Intermediate Representation).
• diannasoreil: Maintenance and development of the RustBridge and Rustlings educational projects.
• robert-king: Creating a 10 video series on creating fun projects with Rust.
• Byron: Improving the Gitoxide project, a Rust implementation of Git. In particular, solving the shallow clone issue.
• tnballo: Develop and release two chapters of the High Assurance Rust book.
• nanjekyejoannah: Developing a Rust-based GC (Garbage Collector) for Python.
• w3eydi: Fostering a Rust community in Turkey through event organization, content creation and social media growth.
• weiznich: Improving error messages for trait heavy crates and working with the crates.io team to prioritize requests related to Diesel, a type safe query builder and ORM for Rust.
• LCrossman: Research and increase the use of Rust in bioinformatics, particularly around improving gene finding in DNA sequences.
• thejpster: Build five prototypes of the Neotron Pico micro-ATX home-computer kit and then 25 production units.
• doc-jones: Continuing to develop the Rust Contributor Program, the RFC which can be found at https://mojosd.medium.com/rustc-reading-club-draft-rfc-a32b16f803bf

Organizational Project Grant Awards #

• codecrafters.io: Create three additional "Build your own X" CodeCrafters courses that can be accomplished in Rust.