Overview
Our host Ken Rimple sits down for an interview with Ashley Williams. Ashley is a member of the Rust Core Team and the founder of The Rust Foundation.
Ken and Ashley get into Ashley’s background as a science teacher in New York, why she made the transition into programming and being self-taught, how she became involved in Rust, and where the language is headed after being ranked the ‘most-loved programming language’ in the Stack Overflow developer survey for 6 years in a row.
They also touch on why the Rust mascot is named Ferris 🦀 and Ashley’s talk at ETE 2022: “Why Rust?” (video coming soon – subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when it’s published.)
About Ashley Williams
Ashley is a current member of the Rust Core team. She is the founder of the Rust Foundation and served as its first executive director. She has served as a leader or member of the Rust crates.io, infrastructure, and community teams, WebAssembly working group, and the RustBridge and Increasing Rust’s Reach programs.
Ashley has been the original author and lead maintainer of many popular developer tools in the Rust ecosystem, from Cloudflare’s wrangler, to wasm-pack, cargo-generate, and several others. Previously, Ashley was a leader of the Node.js Community Committee, founded the NodeTogether educational initiative, and served as the first Individual Membership Director of the Node.js Foundation (now OpenJS Foundation).
Ashley has worked at npm, Mozilla, and Cloudflare. Ashley studied Neuroscience and Philosophy and was originally a middle school science teacher in NYC.