Giving Thanks to Rust Contributors

It’s the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, and the time of year when we’re culturally conditioned to be a bit more public than usual in giving thanks for things.

As always, I’m grateful that I’m working in tech right now, because almost any job in the tech industry is enough to fulfill all of one’s tangible needs like food and shelter and new toys. However, plenty of my peers have all those material needs met and yet still feel unsatisfied with the impact of their work. I’m grateful to be involved with the Rust project because I know that my work makes a difference to a project that I care about.

Rust is satisfying to be involved with because it makes a difference, but that would not be true without its community. To say thank you, I’ve put together a little visualization for insight into one facet of how that community works its magic:

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The stats page is interactive and available at http://edunham.github.io/rust-org-stats/. The pretty graphs take a moment to render, since they’re built in your browser.

There’s a whole lot of data on that page, and you can scroll down for a list of all authors. It’s especially great to see the high impact that the month’s new contributors have had, as shown in the group comparison at the bottom of the “natural log of commits” chart!

It’s made with the little toy I wrote a while ago called orglog, which builds on gitstat to help visualize how many people contribute code to a GitHub organization. It’s deployed to GitHub Pages with TravisCI (eww) and nightli.es so that the Rust’s organization-wide contributor stats will be automatically rebuilt and updated every day.

If you’d like to help improve the page, you can contribute to gitstat or orglog!