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← Rust in Peace

From Law to Workflow

Chapter 5 of 7 · Section 26 of 51

Sections

1. Intro

  • 1. Agenda
  • 2. Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program

2. The Rails Lesson

  • 3. Convention over configuration
  • 4. The database was a shared design
  • 5. Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
  • 6. Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
  • 7. Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
  • 8. "It works on my machine"
  • 9. How new all of this still was
  • 10. From Rails conventions to Navigator
  • 11. A eulogy for my programming career

3. Shared craft compounds

  • 12. Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
  • 13. Widely available — governed in the open
  • 14. A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
  • 15. Say it with your whole chest

4. Six ways to know a change holds

  • 16. One giant change deserves more than one glance
  • 17. The compiler asks whether the program can be true
  • 18. Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
  • 19. Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
  • 20. Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
  • 21. Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
  • 22. Three workshops, three people, one method
  • 23. Fast generation, slow enough verification

5. From Law to Workflow

  • 24. The goal — deterministic workflows from law
  • 25. Step 1 — read the law
  • 26. Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
  • 27. "It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
  • 28. Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
  • 29. Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
  • 30. Step 5 — signature is a modular step
  • 31. Step 6 — the filing, run durably
  • 32. "It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
  • 33. Why a workflow beats a prompt
  • 34. Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product

6. Rust All the Way Down

  • 35. We did not start all Rust
  • 36. From Postgres to Rust — with a bridge
  • 37. The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
  • 38. One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
  • 39. Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
  • 40. Rust reaches the places lawyers work
  • 41. I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
  • 42. Always the latest, always Rust
  • 43. Swap the seam — it still works
  • 44. The crates we actually run on
  • 45. Ethics is part of the stack
  • 46. The simplest developer environment I can get away with
  • 47. The online developer environment
  • 48. "It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
  • 49. Where we are today — live by August 19
  • 50. Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace

7. Wrap Up

  • 51. Take the method home
✓

Step 2 — write the behavior before the code

The first artifact is not Rust — it is a Cucumber feature describing the whole arc in plain language, runnable as a test: a founder intakes, an attorney reviews, signatures land, and the state stamps a filing.

From features/tests/features/nest_formation.feature:


  Scenario: From intake to a stamped Secretary-of-State filing
    When the firm opens the "nv__llc_formation" matter for the client
    And the founder answers the formation questionnaire:
      | value                  |
      | Libra                  |
      | Bright Star Ventures   |
      | Neon Law Registered Agent |
      | members                |
      | Libra; 1 Main St; Las Vegas; NV; 89101; USA |
      | 2026-07-01             |
    And the attorney approves and sends the document
    Then the formation reaches the signature wait
    And the persisted packet is the official SoS form carrying the founder's answers
    And the generated packet is filed as a document in the matter
    When the attorney files the Articles with the Nevada Secretary of State
    Then the formation workflow reaches END
    And a filing was recorded with the "Nevada Secretary of State"
    And the founder's six onboarding answers are on file

Presenter notes

This is the law translated into expected behavior. The cucumber crate runs this scenario against a real Postgres on every cargo test. The feature is the contract; the code below exists to make it pass.

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