Rust in Production is written by and for engineers building Rust applications in a production setting. That can be on the web, embedded, distributed as a package, for-profit, open-source, or any other setting with users that could be meaningfully construed as “production”! All kinds of writing are welcome. This includes…

I’ve been working on growth and user acquisition in startups for a little over three years. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s heavily influenced by how the product works, how it looks and feels, and how quickly it can bring value to a…

Here’s how to approach writing and enforcing a service-level objective — I used to work in Ruby on Rails. It’s not bad to work in if you’re looking to crank some code out quickly, are okay with a few runtime errors, love throwing money at compute resources, and the overall level of service doesn’t need to be that high. It was…

Here’s everything I’ve learned since the start of 2021 — In early 2021, I built a prototype Rust backend service at work. I knew Rust was powerful and ergonomic. It could fly through difficult computation and language features like pattern matching and idiomatic Result and Option enums made it fresh, new, and exciting. Honestly, it's a language that's hard not…

Use Traits to invert your Rust dependencies and keep your code loosely coupled and testable — It was an epiphany moment when I figured out Java classes could be mocked by extending them and overriding their public methods. “Well, duh,” you’re probably thinking. Of course, you can do that, and that’s how half the mocking libraries work anyway! (Also, why not just use a mocking library?)…

At many modern tech companies, teams build services and run them too. I watched this shift take place at the first company I worked at as the DevOps movement was taking off. Rather than writing code on one team, then throwing it over a wall to another team to operate…

Maximize code reuse while protecting your domain boundaries — “Can you revert your last commit and use that third-party Dynamo locking library instead?” My team lead looked at me with his sharp, blue eyes. They were tucked under a strong brow and just visible over a large auburn beard. It gave him a permanent expression of seriousness. “Why’s that?”…

Static sites vs SSR — I’ve talked before about the benefits of a static frontend for scalability, performance, and cost. I’ve used it to great effect in my own projects. However, there are some situations where server-side rendering (SSR) is actually a better choice. When it actually needs to be dynamic The obvious case where SSR is preferable to static is one…

Ephemeral teams are powerful tools. Here’s how to use them for good — Ephemeral teams form for a short time around a particular problem or project. They disband once the problem is solved or the project is complete. While the concept has many benefits, there are also some dangers. …