RiB is One Year Old!

July 30, 2020

Hey, RiB community!

We are happy to announce that RiB is one year old – happy birthday to RiB! This is a late celebration.

Since we released Rust in Blockchain #0 on June 6th, 2019, we have published 14 issues, along with 2 additional blog posts. With more than 20 contributors participating!

The next issue is on the way, and we will publish it on next Wednesday. Contributions to the next draft are welcome.

In the meantime, let’s take this opportunity to look back at what we accomplished, and recognize those who helped along the way.

Why we started RiB

We thought that, although the Rust community is vibrant, and although there were many Rust blockchain projects, those Rust blockchain projects didn’t seem to have a strong voice in the Rust community.

While talking to Florian about how to create spaces within the official Rust infrastructure for people to discuss blockchain subjects, he suggested that we first create a newsletter, like This Week in Rust, specifically for Rust blockchain subjects.

So we did that, and we created a Telegram group, and a Twitter handle, and invited other people to participate.

Several people helped create RiB:

The newsletter idea for RiB came from Florian.
The first issue was made with help from Alexandra, Benjamin, James Chen, and Mike, who also manages the RiB Telegram group.
Sun created and maintains Awesome Blockchain Rust.
Echo designed the RiB logo and other related graphics.

Contributors to RiB Community

Since then, many people have contributed to the newsletter:

Adria Massanet, Alex Gluchowski, Alfredo Garcia, Anais Urlichs, Calvin Lau, Daniel Karzel, Darosior, James Waugh, Ken Shamir, Lane Rettig, María Paula, Mattias Nystrom, Maksym Zavershynskyi, mfaulk, Michael Sproul, Mike, Park Juhyung, Paulii Good, SeungMin Lee, Taylor Lee, Tony Arcieri, Brian Anderson, and Aimee Zhu.

Thanks for your contributions. You made the RiB community great!

Sponsors and Supporters

In the last year, RiB got two cups-of-coffee donations in ETH! Thanks!

With Nervos Network’s sponsoring, we organized RiB meetups, In Rust We Trust, in SF, Berlin, and in Hangzhou, China.

Thanks to SF Blockchain community, and sponsors Nervos, Polkadot, Oasis, NEAR, Xpring, Insight, we made full-day workshops Rust in Blockchain Workshop Day during SF Blockchain Week 2019.

Thanks for all your support!

Numbers

Ours is a relatively small community, perhaps reflecting the niche interests we serve, or perhaps that we haven’t put in enough effort to find our audience.

Until now, RiB has 200+ unique visitors on average per day – unfortunately, we lost the early data while moving the hosting from WordPress to GitHub + Cloudflare. The screenshot shows the data from Cloudflare.

There are,

227 Telegram members,
485 Twitter followers,
592 email subscriptions,
No data for RSS subscriptions.

RiB GitHub repos RiB Newsletter and Awesome Blockchain Rust got 166 stars in total.

Changes in RiB

The newsletter changes as we gain experience, and is getting longer, with more project coverage.

The regular project coverage has grown from 5 projects in the first issue to 14 projects in the latest issue: RiB Newsletter #13 – Stuck inside, hacking away. For more and new Rust blockchain projects, we add them to the “Interesting Things” section.

Awesome RiB page shows almost all the projects.

RiB is intended not to be just a newsletter, but a community where people interested in Rust blockchain subjects, across projects, can come together to discuss technical subjects.

This has not turned out exactly as anticipated: our Telegram group is relatively small and inactive, though the population and volume of discussion do seem to trend slowly higher.

The group has not been a great driver of technical discussion – those discussions seem to happen in project-specific venues. Most of the discussion in-group stems from project representatives posting project news. This is good for the newsletter, but we’re not sure what to make of RiB as a community.

Anyway, communities have a life of their own, and ours does seem to be serving a purpose.

One notable trend that we didn’t anticipate, though we probably should have, is that recruiters sometimes use our Telegram group as a way to get access to candidates.

Our attitude toward posting recruiting messages in the group has been inconsistent – we do have a policy of keeping discussion to technical topics, and sometimes shut down recruiting and marketing talk, but sometimes go with it, perhaps steering the discussion toward project-specifics, for the sake of encouraging discussion.

We’re not sure what to think about this. In any case, job listings are always welcome in the newsletter. We’ll help retweet as well.

What to Expect in the Future

For the second year of RiB, we hope to add more original technical content, as well as expand to cover topics on cryptography, security, consensus, VMs, and crypto-economics.

That’s it for now. Thanks for your time. Keep hacking.