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← Rust in Peace

Wrap Up

Chapter 7 of 7 · Section 59 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

Take the method home

The ask is not a star on a repository — it is the method, and every piece of it is a crate you can pull tonight. Read the law. Write the behavior first. Keep the domain seam in Rust. Put a human at the gate.

Read what we built and why for the longer version — then come find me afterward and let us get crabby together.

Presenter notes

Here is the real ask, and it is smaller than a star and bigger than a link: take the method. Read the law at its source before you write the test. Write the behavior before you write the code. Keep the domain seam in one language long enough that the reuse starts compounding. Put a licensed human at a gate the state machine cannot route around. None of that needs our repository. It needs axum, cucumber, restate-sdk, and the discipline to run the checks you already have on every change you ship.

And here is the part I actually want from a Rust room. Tell me where this leaks. File the bug against the crate we both depend on. Sponsor the maintainer whose library is holding your production up. A two-person firm can run a litigation practice on this stack only because thousands of people kept the ecosystem healthy, so the way to pay that back is upstream, not at us. A language governed by a non-profit taught us that the commons gets stronger when more people show up. Come find me afterward. Let us get crabby together.

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