To the Rustlang core team,

Two years after my first Rust pull request on Mozilla Servo, and after having contributed for about two and a half years to Open Source in general, and Mozilla in particular, I’m willing to commit full time to Rust. I’m willing to spend all of my energy to grow Rust and empower the community.

Within the last year I have had an amazing opportunity to work on Rust full time as a Freelance contractor, building micro services using Tokio and Actix, and working in the embedded field on armv7 targets, building drivers among other things. I have had a chance to learn a lot from brilliant software engineers around the world, whom I’ve met at Oxidize or RustFest for example. I have also had the pleasure to meet people I was considering as role models, such as RustFest organisers, Mozilla mentors while I was contributing to Mozilla projects, and people who were spending time to express their feelings and intent writing blogposts on the state of Rust and the state of the community. It took a lot of empathy, patience, and leadership skills to build such an amazing environment, where people feel safe and thrive with one common goal: Hack without fear.

As far as I can remember, I have always focused my learnings in two directions at the same time:
- First of all I wanted to understand science, figure out how things work, and how to build them. When I was young I was fascinated by physics, mathematics. I had to read and understand everything. I wanted to build experiments, understand electricity, mechanics etc.
- The other field I was really interested in, were social skills. Why do people think and interact the way they do? How do they feel? Is empathy something people are born with, or is it something one can learn and develop? Why do I feel the way I feel? Can I control my emotions? Is there a way to interact with others that will make them feel good and empower them to be their best selves?

The two fields I was really interested in seemed very orthogonal to me. I felt like the time I spent reading about social skills and practising them were dragging me away from a career in Science, but that was until I got into Computer Science.

CS was a space where I could enjoy the tech side, understand some very deep technological concepts, and put it in practice almost instantly. I have started playing a bit with computers at the age of 10, and never stopped since. I first worked on networks and system administration, before I got a first job as a backend developper, and I changed technologies and roles depending on the teams needs. Regardless of the position (and seniority) I would try to figure out what the team needs, and how to help them best.  Very good backend engineers but nobody wanting to do any frontend ? Fair enough, I would learn angularJS and fill the gap. Great frontend engineers but a couple of issues maintaining a backend? I would learn PHP and Python and build it. The team has now grown and we are struggling when putting things in production? Let me have a look at how Jenkins works and how to setup a CI/CD pipeline to avoid mistakes and spending time doing these repetitive tasks. The team feels frustrated because we’re always a step behind and have to react to everything ? Let’s see if we can try to plan our roadmap a little bit, and maybe add some agility that would allow us to feel a bit better.

CS was also a space where I could enjoy the human side, I soon came to understand that It’s never a technical matter, it’s always about humans. As Conway’s law states, An organisation designs systems that reflect their communication structure. If something is not behaving as supposed to, let’s try to figure out where the process/communication issue lies, what each person’s goal is, and how to create a win-win situation and restore communication.

I love being a freelance software engineer because I can focus on different missions for different periods, depending on what really matters the most. I have never enjoyed my job as much as I enjoy consulting now. I am dedicated 100% to my missions in order to get to know the teams, figure out problems, find solutions, and deliver. This applies for technical problems as well as human and systemic issues.

As I read the job description, I couldn’t help myself but think that it would 100% fit my personality, and how much energy I could provide to the team and the community, which is the reason why I’m reaching out to you today.
Worry not though, I have already applied for a Mozilla position twice, and haven’t been lucky so far. But it did not have any impact on my grit, the way I work, and my commitment to Open Source in general, and Rust in particular.
I would however love to get a chance to talk to you more about the team, the position and how I could help you.

Best regards,
Jeremy