Schedule

This talk brings Rust to one of its most high-stakes, underrepresented domains: forensic software for anti-human trafficking work. It’s a technical case study in how to build secure, no-dependency binaries for machines that don’t tolerate failure—and how Rust’s design enables it.

Built and maintained by a solo dev who is also a trafficking survivor, this talk highlights Rust’s power to serve nontraditional teams solving real-world problems. It’s a story of both technical ingenuity and personal mission.

Over the last five years, thousands of developers and hundreds of teams have gone from zero-to-Rust at Amazon. What can we learn from those diverse experiences to help other organizations adopt Rust? This is a blueprint for bootstrapping Rust adoption. We will talk about strategies that work well for bringing Rust into organizations, and strategies that don’t. Domains where Rust is likely to succeed, and areas where it is still a work in progress. This talk is intended for anyone who wants to bring (or increase) adoption of Rust in their organization.

In an era where governments have the ability to eavesdrop on journalists and their sources through mass surveillance infrastructure, The Guardian developed Secure Messaging to provide a secure, anonymous, and easy-to-use initial contact mechanism. This presentation will detail how Rust language features were instrumental in building the system’s secure and performant backend services and how we made an inherently opaque system observable.

This talk distills key insights from the ICRA25 (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) workshop, presenting a comprehensive overview of how Rust is addressing critical pain points in robotics development. The robotics community is at an inflection point, seeking alternatives to traditional languages that struggle with memory safety and concurrency issues. This session provides a timely exploration of Rust’s potential to revolutionize how we build autonomous systems, offering attendees practical guidance on adoption pathways and highlighting real-world success stories. By bridging the academic research presented at ICRA with practical industry applications, this talk offers unique value to those interested in systems programming for safety-critical applications.