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← Rust in Peace

Six ways to know a change holds

Chapter 4 of 7 · Section 30 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

Three workshops, three people, one method

The same explanation changes with the person doing the work:

  • Using the Navigator — the licensed lawyer checks a matter and signs the result.
  • Operating Navigator — the admin operator checks the environment before it goes live.
  • Contributing to Navigator — the contributor checks that an improvement protects the shared corpus.

Presenter notes

One method should not become one generic pitch. The lawyer needs to hear that the harness preserves professional judgment and records the review. The operator needs to hear that dry runs, repeatable provisioning, and readiness checks make a deployment inspectable before it affects a firm. The contributor needs to hear that a small change becomes durable only when it has a focused test and works in the same local topology as production.

Those are three different personas, three different stakes, and three versions of the same discipline: make the claim, then look at it from enough angles that its weak spots have somewhere to surface.

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