The Language of Empathy
by Taylor Cramer
Late one night in January 2016, having spent hours in a university lab debugging seemingly intractable C++ bugs, I made the jump to Rust– a language that recognized my struggle. This empathy for the plight of systems programmers made Rust unique then, and it’s what makes the language invaluable now.
Empathy is a core design philosophy, a technical constraint, and a primary reason why people love writing Rust. This talk explores the tangible impact empathy has had on our code, tooling, and community. We will break down how this design ethos actively shapes our software and explore practical tools for building more empathetic relationships and more robust systems.
Taylor Cramer
she/her
Taylor Cramer currently works on Rust/C++ interoperability at Google. She’s a former member of Rust’s language design and compiler teams, and got her start contributing to Rust back in 2016. Taylor is passionate about welcoming new members into the Rust community and sharing that you, too, can build cool things that help other people <3.