Earlier this month I gave a talk about Servo at Seattle Rust user Group meetup. You can find slides on Github.

I have given talks at conferences, but it's been a long time since I attended a meetup. I love meetups; in general, most meetups are informal, and you can give a freestyle talk. This has to be my favorite part of giving talks at meetups.

The majority of the crowd was very happy to learn that Servo was restarted at Igalia in January 2023. During the meetup, I met several people from different backgrounds. One common thing about everyone present was that they wanted to learn Rust and about projects that use the Rust programming language. Since Servo was the first project to use Rust, it was the best fit for the discussion.

I began the talk by mostly discussing the history and collaboration between the Rust and Servo projects in their initial days, where the team would use the language to develop features in the Servo project and exchange feedback to improve both the language and the project at Mozilla Research.

We explored in depth how Servo was started and its journey so far, concluding the talk by showcasing some of the work we've been doing in layout, Android, and embedding. Additionally, we had Servo running on the Raspberry Pi 500. Everyone could see some demos from our demo website running on the RPi500. I was also super excited to start Servo and share some live demos during the talk as well. I received lots of questions about how Servo benefits from the Rust programming language itself. Some people were also curious about how Igalia ended up restarting the project.

Considering Igalia's involvement in almost all the rendering engines, folks were curious if Igalia took over the project because Servo is also a rendering engine. Igalia has been working on the web and browsers for a very long time, and they have people who have been working on rendering engines for more than a decade. While this remains one of the strong points why Igalia is a good fit to restart the project, I understand the curiosity. When the group of people wanted to restart the project, they reached out to Igalia because of the experience they have with browsers and rendering engines themselves.

If you are curious to know the current status of Servo and where we are now after restarting the project, I gave a talk at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Seattle on the same day. You can watch the recording, or if you prefer reading, I wrote a blog post about it.

Thanks a lot to the nice folks who attend the talk and special thanks to Brad who organized the meetup.