Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Rust maintenance (June-July 2026 report)

For the past few years, I was sponsored by Futurewei to work on upstream Rust. It was great to have the freedom to work on anything I wanted in Rust, be it new features, performance optimizations, bot/tooling/CI improvements or even non-technical work, such as mentoring, governance, surveys or preparing Rust talks. Alas, nothing lasts forever, and my open source funding ended this February. While I did not have much time for Rust during the following months anyway, I have applied for the Sovereign Tech Fellowship grant in the meantime, and I was very lucky to actually get into this year’s cohort of funded open source maintainers! And what is even better is that another Rust maintainer, Denis Cornehl, who maintains docs.rs, got into the same cohort too. My funding started in June, and should last for a year, which is awesome, because now I can again fully focus on working on Rust. I thought that I would post periodic (bi-monthly) updates about the upstream Rust work that I do, similar…