Three (and a half) years of Rust

The Rust programming language has been growing steeply in the recent years. But why? This year is a good year to look back.
Let's take a wide look at both the growing language and the growing project. I'll spotlight a part rarely covered about programming languages: how they grow, how they find adoption and how this process can and must be managed.
The talk also covers the practicalities of using the language. You will learn the important parts of Rust along the way!

Target Audience: Developers, Project Managers, FOSS Contributors
Prerequisites: None
Level: Introductory

Extended Abstract
This is an updated version of a talk given to great reviews at ACCU Bristol. The update is substantial: Rust will have a new language revision (Rust 2018) released by then.
Feedback was very good, especially as the talk spotlights rarely talked about things in a practical fashion. Some feedback included that people didn't expect a talk going beyond syntax and semantics in a language talk.
I've been part of the Rust project as volunteer community manager and have first-hand experience and involvement with all the things I talk about.
The talk is also relevant to managers, as it contains a lot of lessons how to manage a large, distributed, async project.