It’s time for another recap including our highlights of Season 4.

We’ve been at this for a while now (four seasons, and 32 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from Microsoft to Astral, and from password managers to satellite systems.

This time, it’s all about using Rust for foundational software, which is software that is critical to a team or even an entire organization. Rust is a great fit for this type of software!

We would like to thank the guests for their time and insights. We would also like to thank you, the listener for your support and feedback. Hosting and producing a podcast is a lot of work, but it’s worth it when we hear from you. Here’s to another great season!

As a kid, I was always fascinated by space tech. That fascination has only grown as I've learned more about the engineering challenges involved in space exploration.

In this episode, we talk to Vegard Sandengen, a Rust engineer at KSAT, a company that provides ground station services for satellites. They use Rust to manage the data flow from hundreds of satellites, ensuring that data is received, processed, and stored efficiently. This data is then made available to customers around the world, enabling them to make informed decisions based on real-time satellite data.

We dive deep into the technical challenges of building reliable, high-performance systems that operate 24/7 to capture and process satellite data. Vegard shares insights into why Rust was chosen for these mission-critical systems, how they handle the massive scale of data processing, and the unique reliability requirements when dealing with space-based infrastructure.

From ground station automation to data pipeline optimization, this conversation explores how modern systems programming languages are enabling the next generation of space technology infrastructure.

Handling secrets is extremely hard. You have to keep them safe (obviously), while at the same time you need to integrate with a ton of different systems and always provide a great user-experience, because otherwise people will just find a way around your system. When talking to peers, a lot of people mention 1Password as a company that nailed this balance.

In today's episode, I talk to Adam Hendel, the founding engineer of Tembo, about their project, PGMQ, and how it came to be. We discuss the design decisions behind job queues, interfacing from Rust to Postgres, and the engineering decisions that went into building the extension.

Few developers have been as influential to my career as Niko Matsakis. Of course he is a world-class engineer with a PhD from ETH Zürich, a Rust core maintainer who has been working on the language for way more than a decade, and a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS. But more importantly, he is an empathetic human and an exceptional communicator.

Up until a few years ago, Python tooling was a nightmare: basic tasks like installing packages or managing Python versions was a pain. The tools were brittle and did not work well together.

Then, suddenly, we saw a renaissance of new ideas in the Python ecosystem. It started with Poetry and pipx and continued with tooling written in Rust like rye, which later got incorporated into Astral.

Astral in particular contributed a very important piece to the puzzle: uv -- an extremely fast Python package and project manager that supersedes all previous attempts; For example, it is 10x-100x faster than pip.

In this episode I talk to Charlie Marsh, the Founder and CEO of Astral. We talk about Astral's mission and how Rust plays an important role in it.

We don't usually think much about Webhooks -- at least I don't. It's just web requests after all, right? In reality, there is a lot of complexity behind routing webhook requests through the internet. What if a webhook request gets lost? How do you know it was received in the first place? Can it be a security issue if a webhook gets handled twice? (Spoiler alert: yes)

Today I sit down with Tom from Svix to talk about what it takes to build an enterprise-ready webhook service. Of course it's written in Rust.

Victor Ciura is a veteran C++ developer who worked on Visual C++ and the Clang Power Tools. In this first episode of season 4, we talk to him about large-scale Rust adoption at Microsoft.

Victor works as a Principal Engineer on the Rust team in Microsoft's Developer Division, building the compiler toolchain and libraries needed for the broader Rust efforts across the organization. He is a regular speaker at conferences like CPPCon and also spoke at EuroRust 2024.

We talk about Microsoft's first steps with Rust, widespread implementation across key products and services, and Hyrum's Law.

Sit back, get a warm beverage and look back at the highlights of Season 3 with us.

We've been at this for a while now (three seasons, one year, and 24 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from automotive to CAD software, and from developer tooling to systems programming.

Our focus this time around was on the technical details of Rust in production, especially integration of Rust into existing codebases and ecosystem deep dives. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey last season, which helped us dial in our content. Let us know if we hit the mark or missed it!

For the future, we hope to present an even more diverse set of guests and topics. If you have any suggestions, please reach out!

We'll be back in April. In the meantime, check out our dedicated learn page for additional content about Rust adoption.

The car industry is not known for its rapid adoption of new technologies. Therefore, it's even more exciting to see a company like Volvo Cars embracing Rust for core components of their software stack.

We talked to Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars, about the use of Rust for their Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in Volvo's EX90 and Polestar 3 models and how they are building a Rust ecosystem within the company.

Web browsers today face increasing demands for both performance and privacy. At Brave, they're tackling both challenges head-on with their Rust-based ad-blocking engine. This isn't just about blocking ads – it's about doing so with minimal performance impact while maintaining compatibility with existing filter lists and adapting to evolving web technologies.

While we try not to get too sentimental, celebrating one year of 'Rust in Production' alongside the holiday season feels like a perfect occasion to reflect. For this special episode of the podcast, we've gathered heartfelt messages from our guests to the Rust community.

Think about this: software engineers have modern code editors, parallel processing, continuous integration, and countless tools that make their work efficient. But hardware engineers? They're often working with single-threaded tools, limited automation, and workflows that haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Zoo is building the infrastructure to change that, creating a modern set of tools and APIs that will allow companies and engineers to build better hardware design tools and accelerate the development of physical products.

Today we're joined by Jessie Frazelle, CEO of Zoo (formerly KittyCAD), to talk about migrating core parts of Zoo's infrastructure to Rust, boring infrastructure, how Rust can help bridge the gap between software and hardware development, and how Zoo is building the foundation for the next generation of hardware development tools.

Version control is a critical part of any modern software project and git is the most popular tool for the job. But it can be complex and confusing, especially for beginners.

The team behind GitButler believes there is a better way.

They are building a modern Git client that streamlines the process of managing branches, backing up your work, and more. We hear from co-founders Scott Chacon and Kiril Videlov about how they're making Git easier for everyone -- all without sacrificing the power and flexibility that makes Git so popular in the first place.

What's even cooler than writing your own text editor or your own operating system? Building your own hardware from scratch with all the software written in Rust -- including firmware, the scheduler, and the hypervisor. Oxide Computer Company is one of the most admired companies in the Rust community. They are building "servers as they should be" with a focus on security and performance to serve the needs of modern on-premise data centers.

In this episode, I talk to Steve Klabnik, a software engineer at Oxide and renowned Rustacean, about the advantages of building hardware and software in tandem, the benefits of using Rust for systems programming, and the state of the Rust ecosystem.

Picture this: Your organization's data infrastructure resembles a busy kitchen with too many cooks. You're juggling Kafka for messaging, Flink for processing, Spark for analytics, Airflow for orchestration, and various Lambda functions scattered about. Each tool excellent at its job, but together they've created a complex feast of integration challenges. Your data teams are spending more time managing tools than extracting value from data. InfinyOn reimagines this chaos with a radically simple approach: a unified system for data streaming that runs everywhere. Unlike traditional solutions that struggle at the edge, InfinyOn gracefully handles data streams from IoT devices to cloud servers. And instead of cobbling together different tools, developers can build complete data pipelines using their preferred languages - be it Rust, Python, or SQL - with built-in state management. At the heart of InfinyOn is Fluvio, a Rust-based data streaming platform that's fast, reliable, and easy to use.

Next to writing their own operating system, another dream shared by many developers is building their own text editor. Conrad Irwin, a software engineer at Zed, is doing just that. Zed is a fully extensible, open-source text editor written entirely in Rust. It's fast, lightweight, and comes with excellent language support out of the box.

In the first episode of the third season, I sit down with Conrad to discuss Zed's mission to build a next-generation text editor and why it was necessary to rebuild the very foundation of text editing software from scratch to achieve their goals.

As we approach the finale of our second season, it's time for another recap.

Could we shed some light on the current state of Rust's usage in the industry? What has changed in our perception of Rust in production since our last season?

While more companies started to embrace Rust, some of the magic of Rust's early days is gone. I expect more ripple effects as the community clashes with the industry's demands.

This episode takes on a more somber tone, as we peer into the massive tech debt we have accumulated as an industry. And in the dark: a faint glow, a narrow golden path that points us towards a more hopeful future.

Many devs dream of one day writing their own operating system. Ideally in their favorite language: Rust. For many of us, this dream remains just that: a dream.

Jeremy Soller from System76, however, didn't just contribute kernel code for Pop!_OS, but also started his own operating system, RedoxOS, which is completely written in Rust. One might get the impression that he likes to tinker with low-level code!

In this episode of Rust in Production, Jeremy talks about his journey. From getting hired as a kernel developer at Denver-based company System76 after looking at the job ad for 1 month and finally applying, to being the maintainer of not one but two operating systems, additional system tools, and the Rust-based Cosmic desktop. We'll talk about why it's hard to write correct C code even for exceptional developers like Jeremy and why Rust is so great for refactoring and sharing code across different levels of abstraction.

Rust can run everywhere, and by everywhere, we don't just mean on all operating systems, but also in all kinds of harsh environments: from the depths of the ocean to the vastness of space. Today we talk to a company that is using Rust to conquer the air. Fusion Engineering is building drone control systems for the next generation of drones.

Jakub Valtar walks us through how Fusion Engineering came to use Rust as the foundation of their company. He explains why Rust is the safest choice for building drone control systems and what it takes to get into drone development.