Membership Application for Nicholas R. Smith #425
Description
What is your name?
Nicholas R. Smith
What is your preferred email address?
Do you represent a company, institution, consortium, yourself or other entity?
Myself
If you represent a company, institution, consortium, or other entity, please enter it here.
Individual
Why are you interested in joining the Safety Critical Rust Consortium?
I've been working in the energy sector for over 3 years. In that time, I've learned how different the risks are for the deployment of software in critical infrastructure compared to web development and SaaS products. While customers of a company like Netflix or Hulu incur virtually zero cost to upgrade (e.g. refreshing their browser tab) in the case that those companies "shipping" a defect, it can be prohibitively expensive for customers to upgrade critical infrastructure software. For example, I've heard anecdotally that in the energy sector it can cost an electrical utility up to ten times the original price tag of a relay to send personnel out to the substation where it is deployed and upgrade it.
In short, the cost for failure or defects in critical infrastructure is too high. While it is possible to produce high quality critical infrastructure software with existing tools and methods (e.g. C++ and static analysis tools), those methods are often laborious, time consuming, and expensive. I think Rust has a bright future to help lower the cost to making high quality, critical infrastructure software. Today I'm asking to join the Safety Critical Rust Consortium to help be a part of that bright future.
Do you plan to be a producer or observer in the consortium?
Observer