Rust is a systems programming language that is fast and memory safe. Rust has become increasingly popular over the last few years, and is now used by companies such as Dropbox, Discord, and Cloudflare. Rust is known for its strong type system and lack of garbage collection, which makes it a great choice for high performance applications that need to be secure. The White House has recommended that all programmers move to memory-safe programming languages for safety reasons, and given that Rust is memory safe, it is a great choice for this.

I have been writing Rust commerically for a while now, having come from a background of Python. It has been a fun journey so far and I am excited to share what I have learned with you. I am currently using Rust to build the high performance, medical simulation software: Clinical Metrics. The entire backend has been rewritten from Python to Rust and the performance improvements have been significant. The design pattern we have been using is to develop small nanoservices (tiny microservices) that are highly performant and easily tested, and then combine them all into a single binary. We call this approach Nanoservices and set up an open-source project to develop the tools and approaches needed to make this a reality. You can find out more about this project here .

I am also using Rust in my PhD to create a way of generating realistic synthetic data for electronic health research. This is a very exciting project and I am looking forward to sharing more about it in the future. Check out my PhD page for more information. I am using SurrealDB, a Rust based database, as the backend for this project, and they are kindly sponsoring my research.

I am the co-author of the upcoming book: ‘Async Rust’ published by O’Reilly. This book is a deep dive into the async/await syntax in Rust and how to use it effectively. It is currently in early release and you can read it here: Async Rust .

I am co-lead of Women in Rust, a community group that aims to support and encourage women to learn and use Rust. Currently around 3% of Rust developers are women, and we are working to increase this number. We have a monthly meetup and a Slack channel, and we are always looking for new members. If you are interested in joining, please join the meetup group .