@BatmanAoD Regarding “Rust reps”, the kernel of the idea came from a conversation I had with @Manishearth where he mentioned that he was at a non-Rust related Mozilla event, and people were excited to talk to him about Rust. And I have that experience a fair bit too - I tell people I work on Rust and they’re excited to hear about it. So it seems to me there’s a lot of recognition we could achieve just by having Rust folks seen in various relevant social settings.
So the way I pictured it is that we would have people just get out and attend the normal industry events they usually would (though maybe more-so - I know I don’t get out enough), and be known as “the Rust guy/girl”. In particular, we’re in a phase where we’re in a period where we’re trying to raise the profile of Rust in the Mozilla community, so I figured we would start by just having Rust folks go to Mozilla events (there are a lot of them). That’s really safe: they would be welcome there and not have much risk of coming off as pushy sales people. We could of course also think about expanding to all sorts of events in relevant industries.
The big risk though with such an imitative is representing Rust poorly. It’s easy for evangelism to turn into salesmanship or zealotry, and some already have a negative opinion of the boundless enthusiasm of Rust fans. So we’d want to make sure reps were well prepared with an approach that is consistent with Rust values.