ZDNet reports that the Rust Foundation plans to announce Shane Miller, senior engineering manager at AWS, as its first president on April 12. Miller confirmed that he had been “elected chairman of the Rust Foundation by the Board of Directors at its March 9 meeting.”
Miller has nearly 30 years of experience as a software engineer as the lead of AWS’s Rust platform team. At AWS, Miller has been a leader in open source strategic planning and software engineering and delivery. Miller’s Rust platform team includes maintainers and contributors of the Rust language and compiler, as well as developers of the Tokio runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications in Rust. Under Miller’s leadership, the AWS Rust team is carefully designing optimizations and tools for the capabilities engineers will use to build and operate services that take full advantage of Rust’s performance and security.
“Together with the developers in the Rust community, we can strive for advances such as faster performance, greater sustainability, and a more diverse and inclusive engineering community,” Miller said.
In his position at the Foundation, Miller will further the foundation’s mission of empowering Rust maintainers to do their best work and working to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for maintainers on computing, storage, and productivity tools. The common goal of the Rust Foundation is to build an organization “truly accessible to Rust” — to help Rust maintainers grow themselves and as a team by providing resources such as leadership and communication training. Its goal is to make the community inclusive and welcoming to all, including those who may be new to open source projects.
The Rust Foundation is an independent non-profit organization that manages the Rust programming language and ecosystem, with a special focus on supporting maintainers who govern and develop projects. Its initial board of directors consists of 10 members, five from founding companies and five from project leadership. Mozilla, the birthplace of the Rust project, announced plans to form the Rust Foundation last August and has now transferred all of its trademark and infrastructure assets to the new Rust Foundation.
The Rust Foundation brings together AWS, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla (Rust’s original corporate sponsor) to manage the growth of Rust. The founding members of the Rust Foundation represent a two-year commitment to an annual budget of more than $1 million to develop services, programs and activities that support the volunteer work of Rust Defenders.