2025-09-09 | 🧑‍💻 Attending Rustconf 2025 in Seattle, WA 🦀

Background

RustConf is an annual conference about the Rust programming language hosted by the Rust Foundation - the nonprofit that manages the Rust programming language and its community.

This year (2025), RustConf was held in Seattle, WA at the Hyatt from September 2-5. Last year it was in Montreal, Quebec, which I also attended.

Objectives

Both times that I've attended, I've been a little uncertain about my specific objectives. I think my objectives include learning more about Rust, its ecosystem, applications, etc. I think they also include connecting with people who might present an opportunity for a business engagement, open source collaboration, or even investment opportunities. I think I'm also hoping to find some of myself, or find my tribe as well.

I've been attending the Seattle Rust User Group meetups since 2023 but its format leaves limited capacity for getting to know other "Rustaceans" beyond a post-event dinner. RustConf provides a bigger potential for meeting those objectives.

Experience

I attended RustConf proper from Wednesday September 3rd to Thursday the 4th. I also attended a paid Async fundamentals workshop on Tuesday the 2nd, and an "Unconference" on Friday the 5th. The workshop and conference were held at the Hyatt, and the Unconference was held at Fremont Abbey Arts Center.

Venue

The Hyatt was a typical conference location and though not particularly interesting as a venue, was functionally adequate. The spaces had comfortable chairs, lighting, the temperature was comfortable, lighting and ease of movement was good, etc. Since the conference appeared to be attended by mostly males, I found the bathrooms could be a bit busy, but I was sometimes able to access the bathrooms on other conference floors. My biggest complaints, and these are relatively small, are that the coffee wasn't kept stocked throughout the day, and the vegetarian food options were always more desirable to me than the non-vegetarian options, and I found myself wishing I had requested the vegetarian option. I will next year.

I did find a few coffee shops nearby that were pleasant, particularly the Dirty Chai and Raspberry Oat Bar I bought at Grumpy Bean. The "Starbucks" located in the hotel just uses a machine with a touch screen display that the "baristas" tap a few buttons on. Grumpy Bean was the superior choice.

Content

Day 1: Workshop

Herbert Wolverson's Async Fundamental's workshop was the first workshop I've ever attended. I chose his because I'm a big fan of his book "Hands-On Rust" and am looking forward to the imminent release of the follow-up, "Advanced Hands-On Rust". It was the former book that I used to develop a rogue like dungeon crawler that is playable in your web browser.

I've only done a few tutorials in async development, and I don't consider myself a "professional" programmer, so I expected to be in over my head a bit. Herbert did a great job going into the background of async development, pulled back the curtains of how it works in Rust, and some of the idiosyncrasies of the Tokio runtime.

However, I found the pace and the organization of the workshop beyond what I could ingest on the pace it was delivered. I realized afterwards that I had been expecting a project based workshop - akin to the organization of his books, but instead we worked through a series of small exercises that demonstrated various patterns of async code.

I did come away with a better understanding of async overall. At least enough to feel comfortable experimenting in some real applications. I feel I could have got more out of it had I already had some real life async experience - whether in Rust or in another language. I'd gladly attend another of Herbert's workshops, as he was a very pleasant and funny facilitator.

Day 2: RustConf

Day 2 was actually the first day of RustConf. The day opened with some remarks by Dr. Rebecca Rumbul - the CEO of the Rust Foundation, by Nell - the MC for the main ballroom track sessions, and the first Keynote by Microsoft's CTO and Deputy CISO of Azure, Mark Russinovich.

Microsoft, SRUG, and the Reactor

Mark discussed all the ways in which Microsoft is adopting and supporting Rust. Microsoft is also a significant sponsor of RustConf, has employees on the Rust Foundation board, and has made major donations to the Rust Foundation. Microsoft is changing a lot of Windows C++ to Rust.

Despite those claims of support for Rust, Microsoft has left the Seattle Rust User Group ("SRUG") without a regular meeting space, as Microsoft chose earlier this year to close down its Redmond campus building "The Reactor" which hosted not only SRUG, but multiple other meetup groups. It felt like being kicked off campus when I found out, and there was a strong sense of dissonance when I heard Mark's claims about Microsoft's enthusiasm for Rust. Maybe they are planning another, better, place to replace the Reactor, but in the meantime, SRUG has been experimenting with meeting up at Amazon's space, and other places as well.

This didn't take away from the enthusiasm that Mark generated in his keynote, however.

Cont Day 2

I attended various sessions throughout the day, but one of the best and most memorable was by Brooke "goingforbrooke" Deuson. Brooke's presentation was a very well organized description of their work in helping fight against human trafficking by developing an app that enables government prosecutors access case files efficiently. Her presentation loosely followed a STAR format typically used for interviews which I found to make her presentation compelling. Her presentation should be posted to the Rust Foundation's YouTube channel in the coming days, and I'd highly recommend watching it.

The day's closing keynote was by Jonathan Kelley who discussed how Dioxus enables ergonomic fullstack and cross platform application development. Jonathan provided a very compelling demo, and although I am not a fan of React based frameworks (which Dioxus models), I may do a toy project with it just to challenge my own preconceptions.

Amazon sponsored a party at a nearby cantina for RustConf but I elected not to go.

Day 3: RustConf

Already, conference fatigue was setting in, but I was committed (and paid!) to making the most of the day. I decided to try out the "hallway track" talks after the keynotes and various points during the day. That is - just meeting people in breakout rooms, at the snack table, water cooler, etc.

The opening keynote by Nell Shamrell-Harrington was a discussion of the Rust newsletter, "This Week in Rust", it's history, contributors, and getting the most out of it. I avidly read the newsletter and it was interesting to learn how the newsletter gets put together.

After that, I attended a talk I thought was going to be about how Rivian electric vehicles use Rust, but it was instead mostly about how to drive adoption of Rust in the workplace. That is a very important topic, but not what I had expected given the title of the talk - and other talks had already covered it.

This is when I decided to focus on the Hallway tracks - where I connected with entrepreneurs, Seattle locals who hadn't been to a SRUG meetup yet, and young undergrads deciding on the direction they want to take their career. I made several connections and see some potential for those to turn in to possible collaborations in the future.

A couple other talks I attended I found interesting: one was by SRUG's organizer, Brad "Curly {U007D}" Gibson, on how he is building an electric car from first principles and provided a live demonstration of his code running on a Raspberry Pi (or Pico?) while controlling the accelerator and brakes of a mini car. Rain talked about a framework for well-behaved Async task Cancellation which complimented the knowledge from my Async workshop very well.

The final talk of the day was about insights from the annual Rust survey, and revealed the RustConf 2026 location to be Montreal (again).

Afterwards, I closed out the day with the SRUG folks at the same cantina that they Amazon had hosted the previous day.

Day 4: UnConference

The "UnConf" is a special format where attendees choose a set of topics to discuss in a series of breakout groups. I'd participated in this kind of format once or twice before and found it a refreshing break from the formality of the conference format. It also provided a more interactive experience which was important given my conference fatigue.

The location was at the Fremont Abby. Not all of the RustConf attendees were able to go due to the limited capacity of the venue, which was unfortunate. I'm told there was another event held on Microsoft's campus, but don't recall the details.

During this day, I attended group discussions about on-boarding contributors into Rust open source projects, driving adoption of Rust within organizations, CRDTs, and going from newbie to professional Rust developer.

In that last talk, I found some ironic amusement in that a lot of career software developers don't have any Rust running in a production environment, but as a mere consultant for startups, I have deployed (some very limited) Rust in production for a website's back-end.

Sponsor Booths

The Sponsor booths included some familiar companies and a few new ones. Google and Oracle had a couple tables but limited swag. The start-ups had a lot more swag. There were two IDE companies, an AI testing company, and a anti-Ransomware company. All had plenty of stickers and a few tshirts available. Interestingly, Microsoft did not have a table, nor did Amazon. I think most of the attendees wanted to talk to companies about getting jobs using Rust. I just wanted to get a free notebook from the folks at Google (but those were all gone).

Closing Thoughts

RustConf was a good experience - especially considering the proximity to where I live, but I'll have to get more clear on my objectives before deciding whether to go back to Montreal for RustConf 2026. I'm not looking forward to the very long flight from Seattle all the across the continent to Montreal and back.

What I really enjoyed about this RustConf was that connected more closely with fellow SRUG members, made some connections with folks that have potential for future collaboration, and I learned a ton - even in the sessions that I had wrong expectations about.

The conference staff was super professional and kind, and I didn't observe and am not aware of any altercations or negative interactions between people.

When the videos of the talks get posted, I intend to watch a few that I'd heard were good. Particularly Russell Cohen's "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Adopting Rust at Your Company" about how "Over the last five years, thousands of developers and hundreds of teams have gone from zero-to-Rust at Amazon".

If you and I met at RustConf and we didn't exchange contact info, let's connect!