The Hack and Learn on November 26th is canceled. Read on for some details.

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Earlier this year we had to cancel all in-person meetups. Both our biweekly Rust Hack’n’Learn and the monthly Rust’n’Tell moved online. In March we first met in a video call for a Hack’n’Learn and later that month 3 speakers talked at Rust’n’Tell online. We hosted over 20 events this year online!

Moving online brought in a whole other audience from around the globe. Rust’n’Tell Meetups frequently brought in over 100 attendees and the Hack’n’Learn had not only attendees from Berlin, but from all over Germany as well as frequent visitors from Italy, the US, India and other places.

Bringing a format such as the Rust’n’Tell online was reasonably simple: Get speakers into a video call, together with attendees and let them give their talk. Breakout rooms allowed for attendees to directly interact with each other in breaks.

Converting the Hack’n’Learn into an online format turned out to be harder. The Hack’n’Learn lived from the fact that people could drop by, work on their projects, learn Rust and find people with shared interests to hack together. A simple video chat wasn’t the right venue to facilitate the same kind of interactions, so we experimented around with a 2D world to allow splitting into groups. This solved part of the problem, but still lacks the ability to work together on code. Nonetheless we had some pretty interesting discussion rounds every other week for a while, always with a handful of people around.

For the remainder of 2020 we are not going to host an official Rust Hack’n’Learn. Our chat is still available for people to meet, coordinate and start their own adhoc sessions, e.g. using gather.town. For 2021 we will come up with a plan on how we operate this meetup online. For that we need people interested in facilitating and moderating this meetup on an ongoing basis. Reach out to us on Twitter: @RustBerlin.

We are also not hosting another Rust’n’Tell in 2020 either. We plan to resume this meetup on a regular basis in 2021.

Thanks to everyone for the interest in 2020, stay healthy and safe!

Jan-Erik, Florian, Ryan & Bastian