Rust in production at planet scale : lessons learned deploying Rust code to millions of devices
Coding ChatsShow Notes
Coding Chats episode 55 - Emma Nedelcu discusses her experience managing teams that transitioned to Rust at Amazon Prime Video. She highlights the reasons for choosing Rust, including its performance and safety features, and the challenges faced during the transition from JavaScript. Emma explains the importance of over-the-air updates, device constraints, and effective onboarding strategies for engineers. The conversation also covers testing strategies, managing technical debt, and hiring practices for Rust teams, emphasizing the need for a mindset focused on problem-solving and adaptability.
Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Rust and Its Adoption 03:49 Performance Gains with Rust 06:37 Challenges of Over-the-Air Updates 09:36 Onboarding Developers to Rust 12:33 Team Collaboration and Trust 14:53 Testing Strategies for Rust Applications 17:38 Trade-offs and Considerations with Rust 20:13 Hiring and Team Building for Rust 23:02 Advice for Organizations Considering Rust 26:00 Managing Technical Debt in Rust 28:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts 33:52 Exploring Related Content
LINKS Emma's Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanedelcu/
John's Links: John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett/ John’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johncrickett John's Twitter: https://x.com/johncrickett John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
Check out John's software engineering related newsletters:
Coding Challenges: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ which shares real-world project ideas that you can use to level up your coding skills.
Developing Skills: https://read.developingskills.fyi/ covering everything from system design to soft skills, helping them progress their career from junior to staff+ or for those that want onto a management track.
Takeaways Rust was chosen for its performance and safety guarantees. Transitioning from JavaScript to Rust involves a steep learning curve. Over-the-air updates are crucial for device management. Device constraints significantly impact application performance. Onboarding to Rust can take about three months for JavaScript developers. Building trust within teams is essential for fast-paced development. Testing strategies must be robust to handle diverse devices. Rust's compile-time checks require strict runtime discipline. Compiling for WebAssembly requires careful optimization to manage bundle size. The Rust ecosystem is maturing but still evolving. Organizations should engage with the Rust community for better integration. Prototyping can effectively demonstrate Rust's potential to stakeholders. Managing technical debt in Rust involves understanding complexity depth. Hiring for mindset and adaptability is more important than experience. Ideal Rust engineers should have a deep understanding of low-level systems. Candidates should demonstrate initiative and impact in their projects.
More from Coding Chats
Coding Chats Episode 83 - In this episode, VB from OpenAI’s developer experience team explains why he thinks plan mode is obsolete and how coding agents have shifted from step-by-step instructions to outcome-driven, long-running work. We cover how to write a good agents.md, why tests still matter when agents write the code, spec-driven development, and why cloud agents may be the future of dev tooling.
Coding Chats Episode 82 - John talks with Dave Westgarth, head of delivery at a Databricks consultancy. Dave shares his path from a psychology degree and McDonald's into tech, and they discuss why the Scrum Master role is so misunderstood, how it differs from a delivery manager, and whether either needs to be technical.They also look at how AI is changing delivery work. Faster code just moves the bottleneck upstream, John argues there's no AI-specific skill you can't learn in a day, and engineering fundamentals are what make AI useful.
Coding Chats Episode 81 - Ben Howdle talks to John Crickett about being a first time CTO in a start-up. Ben, author of The First CTO, shares what changes when you move from building technology to leading a technical team: the pressure, the trade-offs, and the realization that writing code is only part of the job.Drawing on startup experience and lessons learned the hard way, Ben discusses how to balance quality against runway, manage people, and communicate technical decisions in terms that founders and other non-technical stakeholders can understand. He also explores why resourcefulness, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity matter so much—and why CTOs often spend more time selling ideas than they expect.Whether you’re stepping into your first CTO role or leading a technical team at an early-stage company, this conversation offers candid insights into the realities of technical leadership.
Coding Chats Episode 80 - start-up advisor Alexander Berkovich shares his expertise on building successful start-ups, hiring strategies, CTO roles, and the importance of communication between technical and business teams. Discover practical tips for navigating the challenges of early-stage companies and how to align technical excellence with business goals.
Coding Chats Episode 79 - Richmond Alake, Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle, joins John to discuss agent memory — how AI agents store, retrieve, and adapt to information. He argues that developers building memory on flat files are naively reinventing the database, and that once you factor in concurrency, security, and scalability, a proper database is inevitable. The conversation covers the full memory stack and how Oracle's AI database keeps embeddings and data together without shipping sensitive information to external providers.