ra.nz/) by Tim McNamara

Surreal DB / JFrog

In this slot I jumped between two talks and found both of them to be basically adverts. I started off in a talk about Surreal DB - which is a new graph based database that has features like

• Authorization and access control
• Graph based data
• Documents
• Letting clients connect diretly to the DB!

It sounds like it wants to be the best database for everyone, and to offer every conceivable feature. Unfortunately the 15 minutes of the presentation I watched felt like an infomercial. I think I could have just read their marketing website and gotten the same information quicker. So I left and went to a talk in another room delivered by someone from JFrog. This was also a kind of half advert half talk - but did cover some interesting details about various supply chain attacks that they're aware of - and concrete information about how their products can help mitigate such attacks.

Using rust at Fly.io

I was interested in this talk because I use fly.io to host Contentful's internal meme platform, and I think it's great. The talk, which was given by Senyo Simpson covered some details about how fly's networking works. They apparently use DNS anycasting, which as I understand it, is a way of having multiple servers in different locations with the same IP address. Doing this lets them route traffic from any client to that clients closet point of presence. It sounds pretty neat, and is something I want to learn more about.

My use of Fly so far has been running code on a single instance, generally in Frankfurt. It sounds like I'm missing some of the real benefits of Fly, which are letting your code run on the edge. I'm hoping that this year Contentful's meme platform will experience enough growth to justify moving it to an elaborate distributed setup.

Besides the networking details, a lot of this talk was a kind of 'Rust experience report'. A lot of the talks at this conference had an element of this, and it was interesting to see the consistency. Basically everyone seems to agree that Rust is really good - and that the main challenges are getting started, and onboarding people into it. Senyo talked about how Rust's values lead to a language which is good for experienced users, but less approachable. The language and community value soundness and performance over approachability and ergonomics, which means that as rust develops we will always see performance and soundness improvements priorisited when they are in conflict with ease of use.

Conclusion

I had a nice time at Rust Nation. The talks were good, but I found that the best part of the conference were the conversations I had with random strangers. I spoke to some really interesting people about topics like:

• Running red team attacks on UK various parts of the UK's infrastructure.
• Compiling LLMs to run in a webbrowser
• How smarkets calculate prices for their various odds they offer.

If I had my time again I would try and talk to more people, even though I found the process of introducing myself to random people pretty draining. I would also have gone to more workshops instead of talks. Watching ~7 talks in one day is too much for me.

In general, I want to applaud the organisers on running a really good conference.