Rust NYC: 'Data Shapes Your Memory' and 'Rust in Peace'

Join us on Thursday, August 20th over at Nominal Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begin at 7:15 p.m. We have two pillars of the Rust NYC community making an appearance!

'The Shape Of Your Data Is The Shape Of Your Memory' will be presented by Dov Alperin

A Vec\ is the most natural thing to reach for in Rust when you're writing a SQL database, and on a hot path it can also be the thing that kills you. This talk follows an in-progress migration inside Materialize, a streaming SQL database, as we move a core data structure from rows on the wire to columns on the wire. It's the same bytes in a different (and, I'd argue, better for our use case) shape: whether the thing can spill to disk instead of falling over under memory pressure, and how well the layout plays with the hardware once you start caring about memory alignment.

Dov Alperin is a Member of Technical Staff over at Materialize and a long time supporter of Rust NYC. It's been a while since we've had Dov speak, but he's one everyone always gets excited ofr!

'Rust in Peace' will be presented by Nicholas Shook

Rust in Peace is a eulogy to my programming career. Over the past year, teaching coding at Apple, I realized nearly all my students were vibe coding and had stopped needing me. That was the signal to go back to practicing law. Our firm runs its entire practice on one Rust monorepo: the store, the durable workflow engine, identity, telemetry, PDF generation, and the browser surface. We're currently litigating nine-figure matters, and the software is what gives us the context to win them. This talk walks through what that actually looks like in production, including our migration from Postgres to SurrealDB. That move was driven by the discovery that the hardest question in legal work is a graph one, because we deal with people, their relationships, and their problems. You'll see how it fits together, and how we chose Rust vendors all the way down: Restate, Rauthy, OpenObserve, Pingora, Stalwart, and Regorus. Writing software isn't my job anymore. That's only possible because the ecosystem is this good, because the LLMs are this good, and because communities like RustNYC are this good. So please come to my retirement party and let's get crabby together.

[Lawrence Harvey](https://www.lawrenceharvey.com/) is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support and Ben & Arianna key parts of the organizing team.

The space is generously sponsored by our partner Nominal