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← Rust in Peace

Shared craft compounds

Chapter 3 of 7 · Section 23 of 59

Sections

1. Intro

1. May my soul rust in peace
2. 5 Years at the Fruit
3. 4 years finance data & platform engineering
4. 1 year teaching programming
5. What I realized is
6. Decided to be a lawyer in New York
7. What our firm does
8. NeonLawNavigator
9. Agenda
10. Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program

2. The Rails Lesson

11. Convention over configuration
12. The database was a shared design
13. Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
14. Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
15. Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
16. "It works on my machine"
17. How new all of this still was
18. From Rails conventions to Navigator
19. A eulogy for my programming career

3. Shared craft compounds

20. Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
21. Widely available — governed in the open
22. A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
23. Say it with your whole chest

4. Six ways to know a change holds

24. One giant change deserves more than one glance
25. The compiler asks whether the program can be true
26. Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
27. Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
28. Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
29. Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
30. Three workshops, three people, one method
31. Fast generation, slow enough verification

5. From Law to Workflow

32. The goal — deterministic workflows from law
33. Step 1 — read the law
34. Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
35. "It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
36. Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
37. Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
38. Step 5 — signature is a modular step
39. Step 6 — the filing, run durably
40. "It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
41. Why a workflow beats a prompt
42. Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product

6. Rust All the Way Down

43. We did not start all Rust
44. From Postgres to Rust — over a bridge, since dismantled
45. The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
46. One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
47. Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
48. Rust reaches the places lawyers work
49. I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
50. Always the latest, always Rust
51. Swap the seam — it still works
52. The crates we actually run on
53. Ethics is part of the stack
54. The simplest developer environment I can get away with
55. The online developer environment
56. "It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
57. Where we are today — live by August 20
58. Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace

7. Wrap Up

59. Take the method home

Say it with your whole chest

And when someone asks why it is written in Rust: because we are doing it in motherfucking Rust.

Presenter notes

The language says we intend to be right. There is a version of engineering humility that shades into apologizing for existing, and it does not serve clients, it does not serve the mission, and it does not close deals. Fuck yeah, we are the best at this. Fuck yeah, it is in motherfucking Rust — memory-safe, fearlessly concurrent, and compiled to a single binary a clinic can run on a laptop. Pick the tools you can defend all the way down, then say the claim out loud.

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