Rust contributor Orhun Parmaksız joins JetBrains as Rust developer advocate

Orhun Parmaksız, the Ratatui maintainer behind one of Rust’s most visible terminal UI projects, has joined JetBrains as a Rust Developer Advocate. He said he had moved to Berlin and was already working from JetBrains’ Berlin office, a move that puts a well-known community builder inside a company that is betting harder on Rust education and tooling.

Ratatui gives that name recognition real weight. The community-driven successor to tui-rs now lists more than 3,700 crates built with it, 20.2k GitHub stars and 26.3 million crates.io downloads. Parmaksız is not stepping into a generic evangelism role, either. He said the job will focus on creating content for the Rust community, including projects, blog posts, videos, livestreams and talks, while also improving Rust tooling, especially RustRover, by feeding back directly to JetBrains’ product team.

He described himself as a bridge between the Rust community and JetBrains and RustRover, and that is the part hobbyist Rust users will feel first. JetBrains had already worked with him on a livestream last year, then later sponsored his personal projects and Ratatui. With Parmaksız now in-house, that relationship moves from occasional collaboration to an ongoing pipeline of community-facing material and product feedback. For people who learn Rust through examples, talks and hands-on tooling, that matters more than a polished announcement page.

The timing lines up with RustRover’s own push. JetBrains released the standalone Rust IDE in 2024 and says it is free for non-commercial use. RustRover 2026.1 added native cargo-nextest support, call hierarchy navigation, easier macro-expansion access, configurable module visibility and ACP registry support for AI agents. In plain terms, JetBrains is trying to make more of the Rust workflow live inside the IDE instead of bouncing between editor, terminal and tooling scripts.

JetBrains is also leaning on the broader Rust signal. Stack Overflow’s 2024 developer survey named Rust the most admired programming language with an 83% score, and the Rust Project’s 2025 State of Rust Survey drew 7,156 responses. JetBrains said its RustRover team was a Gold sponsor at RustWeek 2026 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, for the third year in a row, and that more than 900 Rust developers, educators and maintainers were there. Parmaksız’s move fits that pattern: Rust is no longer just a language people admire, it is a tooling market worth staffing for.