Rust in Peace

May my soul rust in peace

Las Vegas Ruby Group

5 Years at the Fruit

4 years finance data & platform engineering

1 year teaching programming

What I realized is

Decided to be a lawyer in New York

Agenda

• Why go all-in on Rust
• {Library,Data,DevX,Cloud} tour
• Navigator: Everyone vibes
• Notations: Markdown => PDF with workflows
• Thanks

Compiled, correct, and fast

Amazing Community

What other compiled language has meetups this big? And a discord community of thousands.

Mac, Windows, Linux

Rust works on all three.

Non-profit governance

The Rust Foundation > Private Company

snake_case > camelCase

rob_balicki or robBalicki

Libraries: Some crates

The private Navigator monorepo uses this Cargo.toml stack.

• HTTP and views — axum, dioxus, tower / tower-http
• Store & Durable execution — surrealdb, restate-sdk
• Telemetry & Backups — opentelemetry, arrow, parquet
• Notations — typst
• Cloud — google-cloud-storage, reqwest

Libraries: Developer parity

Local KIND deployment

• Rauthy - OIDC
• Regorus - OPA
• Restate - Durable Workflows
• Surreal - Store

Data: People

A person can be one of:

• Client - someone with a retainer
• Clerk - a supervised worker
• Lawyer - member of the bar
• Admin - lawyers with admin access to the system
• Owner - owner of the system

Data: Project

A project or "matter" is a loose and flexible arrangement of legal services.

Each has at least one client and lawyer DRI who can make decisions.

Data: Documents

The abstract deliverable of lawyers.

Contracts, pleadings, forms.

DevX: Monorepo

Private Navigator monorepo

DevX: Glossary & Ontology

www.neonlaw.com/glossary

DevX: Tests

Unit & Integration. High code coverage.

DevX: Multiple explanations

Compare a long string that can't fit in memory? 6 unique spots.

Here, 6 unique explanations. Tests, code, prs, commits, diagrams, workshops, etc.

DevX: Agent skills

Optimize for both Claude Code & Codex.

Adversarial review between the two is amazing.

DevX: Works on my machine

Linux, Mac. Local with and w/o Kind. GKE.

Orbstack for local containers

DevX: Build for all use cases

Web. CLI. MCP.

DevX: One flow, worktree per PR

One main branch. Squash & Merge. Worktree per PR.

Tag only from main.

Cloud: GCP

Omakase. Nicer customer support.

Cloud: GKE Autopilot

Kubernetes is awesome, even if maintaining isn't.

Cloud: SaaS

SaaS will never die, the same way restaurants wont.

Sendgrid, Docusign, Xero, Slack, Notion, GitHub.

Cloud: Infra Surreal DB & Restate

Each proudly Rust and based abroad.

Cloud: Iceberg backups

Save everything application {logs,telemetry,data} in Iceberg.

Different GCP account and different vendor.

High-Throughput Low-Cost

Our north star is Access to Justice

Lifecycle of a project

Intake, our customer conversion

Collect info. Web forms, chat prompts, API calls (e.g. ID.me, Docusign)

Continous feedback

The best ideas never happen with one person. We work with our teammates and clients.

Custom web apps, client MCPs, phone & video.

Create documents

Frontmatter

title: Retainer Agreement
code: onboarding__letter
respondent_type: person_and_entity
jurisdiction: NV
confidential: true

questionnaire:
  BEGIN: { _: person__client }
  person__client: { _: project__engagement }
  project__engagement: { _: END }
  END: {}

workflow:
  BEGIN: { intake_submitted: intake_persisted__client }
  intake_persisted__client: { retainer_rendered: lawyer_review }
  lawyer_review:
    approved: generate_pdf__retainer_pdf
    changes_requested: reask__client
    rejected: END
  generate_pdf__retainer_pdf:
    pdf_persisted: sent_for_signature__pending
  sent_for_signature__pending:
    signature_received: END
  END: {}

Markdown

{{custom_datetime__engagement_start_date}}

{{person__client.name}}

Re: Retainer Agreement — {{project__engagement.name}}

Dear {{person__client.name}}:

This Retainer Agreement (the "Agreement") is entered into between the Firm and
{{person__client.name}} (the "Client"), reachable at
{{person__client.email}}, for legal services on the matter referred to as
{{project__engagement.name}}.

...

A Clippy for law

navigator project gate --help
Check this repository.

Usage: navigator project gate [OPTIONS]

Options:
      --ci
          Hold the run to what CI can prove.

  -h, --help
          Print help (see a summary with '-h')

Render the retainer

navigator template render \
  templates/neon_law/shared/retainer.md \
  --out /tmp/retainer.pdf

Rust in peace

I still vibe in the background, but the foreground is being your lawyer.