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How did you get your first job programming with Rust? I have a suspicion that most people just added Rust to their company's tech stack before it was officially sanctioned, thus creating a Rust job.

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My role originally was mostly C# but I had some Rust experience in college so I was placed near a team that was driving Rust adoption at my company. Eventually we merged with that team which gave me a good excuse to rewrite some tooling or do greenfield development in Rust 😄

Working out great! The ecosystem around Rust has continually gotten more useful for us since we made the transition from C++. It’s been a huge positive.

They’re not likely to open new full time positions for it, but we got a lot more people there interested in and enthusiastic about Rust, especially fur interop with C and Python.

Yeah. I definitely had a job at a place writing Python/Javascript and there was a project that was a perfect fit for Rust and was one of the first people to write rust there.

docs.rs/smallbigint :3 haven’t looked back at it since. It’s a Lisp-head (me) wanting the transparent bigints from dynamic languages, and playing with macros to get it I think the talk is even still on YouTube, but I’m afraid to watch it again 😁

docs.rssmallbigint - RustTwo types, `Uint` and `Int`, like `smallvec` for big integers. Anything that fits in 32 bits stays on the stack. Numbers that don’t fit are stored in a `Box<num_bigint::BigUint>` / `Box<num_bigint::Bi...

Yep. Got frustrated with C++, wanted derive macros in a new somewhat standalone part of the project so I wrote that in Rust. I do think I at least asked my PhD advisor if it was fine and he didn't say no. Later I made a hobby project which was obviously in Rust into my main project

More or less. In my case I took over a team where someone had unofficially added Rust to the stack. We then took that and went with it. That was over 6 years ago and we still have a mix, but everything that can be written in Rust is, and we’re gradually replacing the rest.

Pretty much. First showed up in 2019 being used by a single team and went mostly unnoticed. In 2023 support was added to Bazel. In 2024 my team picks it up (mainly for build and devx things). It took off from there and is now finding usage across our stack.

Go (a sanctioned language) was in place before Rust and my team gave it a try. Didn’t get much traction and the error handling a common source of mistakes. Jump to 2025 and there are no sanctioned languages. Just need to make a good case for inclusion.

Sadly not working as a rust dev officially. I’ve a number of open source projects. laio.sh is one of them. Even after 3 years I consider myself a noob. My company still has its head firmly stuck in the sand when it comes to rust. Writing kubernetes operators on the JVM is apparently a great idea 🤦‍♂️

laio.shlaio

The company had an open-source CLI tool built with Rust and it was one of the projects I was tasked to add some more features to. From there I've used Rust in multiple projects.

I didn't add Rust to the tech stack of the Java shop I was at when I first learned Rust (although I ported a few things I liked to Java), instead I got a different job that had Rust from the get go.