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← Rust in Peace

Rust All the Way Down

Chapter 6 of 7 · Section 57 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

Where we are today — live by August 20

Every seam now has its Rust answer, decided and recorded: SurrealDB (Surreal Cloud) for the store, Restate Cloud for durable execution, OpenObserve Cloud for telemetry, Stalwart Managed Email for every matter address, Miuda PBX on RustPBX for voice, Pingora at the private edge, Garage and Rauthy in the local loop, Regorus for policy, Dioxus for every view, Typst for every document. Running by August 20, 2026.

Presenter notes

This is where we are today — not a wish list, a decision list. Each of these is a recorded owner decision in the repository's issues, grounded in a spike or a source read, with its covering tests and cutover gates named before any code lands. The store is SurrealDB with Surreal Cloud in production and an in-memory engine in every test. Durable execution stays Restate, now as Restate Cloud per deployment. Telemetry lands in OpenObserve — one Rust binary locally, their cloud in production. Every matter gets an email address on a dedicated subdomain served by Stalwart, inbound and outbound, with every message archived to the Iceberg lake. Voice is Miuda's commercial build of RustPBX — the IVR is an Axum webhook in this workspace, not a dialplan file. Pingora guards the private edge behind a per-org tailnet — and because the tailnet is the edge, a Project developer's browser reaches the API only from a machine already on it, so even the cross-origin grant rides the VPN, while production, which has no such edge, hands out none. Regorus evaluates our policies in-process, and Dioxus and Typst render every screen and every document. And we say the edges plainly, because the commercial-relationship slide taught us to: Xero invoices, DocuSign signs, a SIP trunk carries the calls, Google Workspace holds the humans' mail. Those are relationships at the boundary — all software in the path is Rust. The date is real and we are saying it out loud: this stack runs by August 20, 2026. Hold us to that too.

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