Meet our RustConf 2024 speakers and workshop hosts!

Looking for our schedule of talks? Click here.

 

Emcees

  • Nell Shamrell-Harrington
    Nell Shamrell-Harrington

    Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a Principal Engineer at Microsoft working in Azure Core. She also serves as vice-chair of the Rust Foundation Board of Directors and lead editor of This Week in Rust. Additionally, she co-leads the Memory Safety special interest group in the OpenSSF. Outside of work, she enjoys raising pet bunnies!

  • Ernest Kissiedu
    Ernest Kissiedu

    Ernest Kissiedu is the lead organizer of Rust Nation UK: a conference that focuses on introducing people to the Rust ecosystem. He is also the organizer of the Rust London Meetup Group and a co-founder of the DevX Initiative, which empowers current and would-be Rust contributors through research, workshops, and sponsorship.

Keynotes

Keynotes will open and close both main conference days at RustConf.

  • Aeva Black
    Aeva Black

    Aeva Black is the Section Chief for Open Source Security at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and an open source hacker and international public speaker with 25 years of experience building digital infrastructure and leading open source projects at technology companies. She has previously served on the OpenSSF Technical Advisory Committee, OpenStack Technical Committee, Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee, and led open source security strategy within the Microsoft Azure Office of the CTO. In her spare time, Aeva serves on the Board of the Open Source Initiative and enjoys riding motorcycles and supporting her local LGBTQ+ community.

  • Nicholas Matsakis
    Nicholas Matsakis

    Nicholas Matsakis is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and Co-Lead of the open source Rust Language Design Team. He has worked on Rust since 2011, and led the design of its “secret sauce”, the borrow checker. He has played a number of other roles in Rust over the years, such as being a member of the Rust core team, the lead of the Rust compiler team, and helping to launch the Rust Foundation. Prior to working on Rust, he completed a PhD at ETH Zurich and did his undergraduate study at MIT.

  • Jack Huey & James Munns
    Jack Huey & James Munns

    Jack Huey is a PhD student who has been a member of the Rust Project since 2019. First contributing to Chalk and then later to the compiler itself, his passion in Rust is type system design and experimentation. He currently co-leads the types team, is a member of the compiler team, is a lang team advisor, and is the lang representative for the leadership council.

    James Munns is a software engineer currently living in Berlin. He primarily works with Rust and Embedded Systems. He is one of the founding members of the Rust Embedded Working Group, and the Leadership Council Representative for the Launching Pad team.

  • Miguel Ojeda
    Miguel Ojeda

    Miguel Ojeda is a software engineer who maintains the Rust for Linux project. He was the Spanish NB in the ISO C committee, with an interest in Undefined Behavior and memory safety topics. Previously, Miguel was a Staff Member at CERN in the Beams department and a Fellow in the Physics department.

    CHECK OUT MY TALK
    "Rust for Linux"

RustConf

RustConf will feature speakers across a variety of topics and be tailored to audiences with various levels of familiarity with the Rust programming language.

  • Isabel Atkinson
    Isabel Atkinson

    Isabel has been a Software Engineer on the MongoDB Rust driver team since 2020. Outside of work, you can find her knitting sweaters and spending lots of time outdoors in Boulder, Colorado.

  • Chris Biscardi
    Chris Biscardi

    Chris is an independent educator and engineer who has been working on the web for over a decade.

  • Nick Cameron
    Nick Cameron

    Nick is a consultant, engineer, and educator, who previously worked on Rust at Microsoft and was a member of the Rust Project Core team. He worked on distributed databases at PingCAP, Firefox graphics and layout, research in PL, and type systems.

  • Adam Chalmers
    Adam Chalmers

    Adam has been building high-performance Rust services as a Systems Engineer for five years at Cloudflare and Zoo.dev. He teaches Rust through his blog and YouTube videos.

  • Kyler Chin
    Kyler Chin

    Kyler Chin is a computer science student at University of California, Irvine where he researches public transport computer science at Catenary Transit Initiatives.

  • Rohit Dandamudi
    Rohit Dandamudi

    Rohit is a Computer Science Masters student at the University of British Columbia and a Rust Foundation Fellow. He has actively worked with diverse open-source communities over the past six years and was introduced to Rust in 2021 while working on Tremor Project.

    CHECK OUT MY TALK
    "Widening the Ferris Net"
  • Michael Gattozzi
    Michael Gattozzi

    Michael is an industry veteran currently working on InfluxDB Edge, InfluxData’s new open source time series database. Prior to InfluxData he worked at companies like Fastly, where he built out their Compute@Edge platform for running code all around the world close to your users and Commure, where he built out systems to enable better interoperability among healthcare systems and hospitals. While Michael has mainly specialized in networking, back end systems, and Rust over the past 9+ years, he is always driven to learn more while making sure to get a good trail run or hike in during the week.

  • Dr. Rebecca Rumbul
    Dr. Rebecca Rumbul

    Dr. Rebecca Rumbul will be delivering opening remarks at RustConf and Rust Global. She leads the Rust Foundation as Executive Director & CEO, holds a Ph.D. in Politics and Governance, and has worked as a consultant and researcher with governments, parliaments, and development agencies all over the world. Across her career, Rebecca has been an advocate for openness and transparency, and developing tools to improve digital participation. In addition to leading the Rust Foundation, Rebecca is a Non-Executive Director and Council Member for the UK Advertising Standards Authority and a Trustee of the Hansard Society.

  • Marc-Andre Giroux
    Marc-Andre Giroux

    Marc-Andre Giroux is a senior developer working at Netflix on the API Infrastructure team. He is the author of the book “Production Ready GraphQL.

  • David Koloski
    David Koloski

    David Koloski works at Google on the Fuchsia operating system. In his spare time he develops rkyv, a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust, and does some hobbyist game development.

  • Pallavi Thukral
    Pallavi Thukral

    Pallavi Thukral is a software developer from India working at BNY Mellon. With a background in computer science, she has experience in Rust, cloud, and Android. As a gold medalist in her b.tech program, she combines academic and practical insights to bridge theory and real-world application.

  • Pedro Rittner & Sean Lawlor
    Pedro Rittner & Sean Lawlor

    Pedro is a Senior Staff Production Engineer working on hardware health telemetry and failure detection for all production hardware at Meta

    Sean Lawlor is a Software Engineer at Meta. He spends his time building distributed systems and maintaining the open-source crate ractor

  • Predrag Gruevski
    Predrag Gruevski

    Predrag wants to query everything through the Trustfall query engine. Previously, he worked as a principal engineer at Kensho Technologies and did performance engineering at MIT. Ask him about the time he saw a giant rocket explode after launch!

  • Sparrow Li
  • Joshua Liebow-Feeser
    Joshua Liebow-Feeser

    Josh is a Software Engineer working on security for the Fuchsia OS at Google, where he supports Rust programmers in writing secure software. He is the creator and co-maintainer of zerocopy, and previously led the development of Netstack3, Fuchsia’s pure Rust networking stack.

  • Angus Morrison
    Angus Morrison

    Angus Morrison is a Rust expert working in the space and finance industries. He shares practical guidance on howtocodeit.com, a home for ambitious Rustaceans.

  • Joannah Nanjekye
    Joannah Nanjekye

    Joannah Nanjekye is a programming languages researcher in an IBM. She is the author of the book, Python 2 and 3 Compatibility, published by Apres. She is a Python core developer and former director of the Python Software Foundation.

  • Jonathan Pallant
    Jonathan Pallant

    Jonathan Pallant is a Rust Consultant/Trainer at Ferrous Systems, the author of tinyrlibc, pc-keyboard, and embedded-sdmmc. Lead developer at the Neotron Project, a Rust Foundation Community Grant recipient, a Rust Embedded Working Group member, and a former member of the Rust Leadership Council.

  • Martin Pool
    Martin Pool

    From distcc in 2003 to cargo-mutants in 2023, Martin’s long enjoyed finding ways to burn up CPU cores to help developers ship better software faster. He also works on Stripe’s Security team, helping protect a trillion dollars of annual payments and the sensitive information of many people.

  • Jacob Pratt
    Jacob Pratt

    Jacob Pratt is a Senior Software Engineer, a contributor to Rust’s compiler and standard library, and a maintainer of widely-used crates in the Rust ecosystem.

  • Nathan Stocks
    Nathan Stocks

    Nathan Stocks is a Rust Instructor, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, the creator of Rusty Engine, and an indie game developer. Aside from Rust, his interests are family, food, pickleball, and games of all kinds.

  • Jack Wrenn
    Jack Wrenn

    Jack spends his days as an Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services, and his evenings as a volunteer bike mechanic. At AWS, he works to advance the state-of-the-art in the Rust language and ecosystem. He co-maintains the popular itertools and zerocopy crates, and is lead of Project Safe Transmute.

Rust Global

Rust Global is a Rust Foundation-hosted half-day event taking place on Friday, September 13. It will feature content about the professional use of Rust in global leadership settings. Rust Global is open to "Industry/Government" ticket holders while capacity remains.

  • Dr. Rebecca Rumbul
    Dr. Rebecca Rumbul

    Dr. Rebecca Rumbul will be delivering opening remarks at RustConf and Rust Global. She leads the Rust Foundation as Executive Director & CEO, holds a Ph.D. in Politics and Governance, and has worked as a consultant and researcher with governments, parliaments, and development agencies all over the world. Across her career, Rebecca has been an advocate for openness and transparency, and developing tools to improve digital participation. In addition to leading the Rust Foundation, Rebecca is a Non-Executive Director and Council Member for the UK Advertising Standards Authority and a Trustee of the Hansard Society.

  • Martin Geisler
    Martin Geisler

    Martin Geisler is a Senior Engineer working on Rust in Android. He has been using Rust since 2015 and have published several crates, including the one responsible for wrapping your help texts in Clap.

    CHECK OUT MY TALK
    "Rust Training at Scale"
  • Ed Jones
    Ed Jones

    Ed’s life is slowly being taken over by Rust and, being an unabashed Rust and FOSS fanatic, he couldn’t be happier about it. At work, he pushes for Rust use in both new and existing projects, helping train new Rustaceans and make sure everyone’s on the same page. Outside of work, he programs quite a bit (mostly in Rust, of course) and has worked on a range of things including a typesetter, a Blender extension and an OpenTTD AI. The rest of his time he spends gaming long hours into the night, either building things in Minecraft or getting destroyed in Counter Strike.

  • Walter Pearce
    Walter Pearce

    Walter Pearce is a key leader of the Rust Foundation’s Security Initiative. Walter comes from a 14-year career in security. For the past seven years, he has specialized in offensive security in the gaming industry, leading efforts to find and mitigate vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of players at Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment. Before that, he was a security consultant providing penetration testing, red teaming, and code review services for many Fortune 100 companies whose foci included operating systems, languages, and embedded systems. He was previously a contributor and member of the Amethyst Game Engine and a lead contributor on other open source game development projects.

    CHECK OUT MY TALK
    Dude, Where's My C?
  • Frédéric Ameye
    Frédéric Ameye

    Frédéric Ameye is Tech Lead/Cybersecurity Engineer at Ampere (Renault Group) — a role that enables him to make cars more secure by putting Rust in them!

  • Quanyi Ma
    Quanyi Ma

    Quanyi Ma is a Principal Engineer at Huawei and the independent director of the Web3 Infrastructure Foundation, where they focus on promoting the Rust programming language in the Chinese community. They are committed to incubating and promoting more open-source projects developed using Rust, from foundational software to Web3, to create a more secure world jointly.

Workshops

RustConf will feature three optional, hands-on workshops on Tuesday, September 10. Learn more and secure your workshop spot during registration while capacity remains!

  • Jorge Ortiz Fuentes
    Jorge Ortiz Fuentes

    Jorge is a developer advocate working at MongoDB. He started working for the M.I.T. in 1993, primarily working on projects internally for HP, where he worked for more than 15 years. He focused on mobile development, from 2008 to 2018, when he extended his focus to some backend development again (mostly Rust & Go). He is passionate about software architecture and best practices and was an instructor for some of the best developer bootcamps in the U.S.A. and Europe. He occasionally delivers microservices and mobile development courses, training individual developers and the teams of some of the biggest companies worldwide.

  • Carl Kadie
    Carl Kadie

    Carl is a volunteer on open-source projects related to Machine Learning, Genomics, Rust, and Python. He is a retired team member at Microsoft & Microsoft Research. He has a Ph.D. in computer science and ML.

  • Herbert Wolverson
    Herbert Wolverson

    Herbert is the author of Hands-on Rust, Rust Brain Teasers and the Rust Roguelike Tutorial. Herbert teaches Rust with Ardan Labs, from zero-to-hero.