Neon Law
  • Notations
  • Nimbus
  • Workshops
  • Show-and-tell
  • Sign in
← Rust in Peace

Rust All the Way Down

Chapter 6 of 7 · Section 43 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
✓

Swap the seam — it still works

Every heavy dependency sits behind a trait, so changing one does not make the application a rewrite. Signatures, storage, identity, durable execution, policy, telemetry, and the project repository surface have all had an explicit seam. Sometimes the right change is a new provider; sometimes it is retiring a surface entirely.

Presenter notes

Callback, and the one that sets up the finale. Because every heavy piece is behind a Rust trait, the environment is a set of plugs, not a monolith. Signature is a SignatureProvider — DocuSign in production, a recording stub in dev and tests. Object storage is a StorageService — Google Cloud Storage in cloud deployments; locally, the S3-compatible Garage. Identity is OIDC, with Google in production and Rauthy in the local loop. Postgres remains the store while the SurrealDB port advances seam by seam. The project repository surface was deliberately retired in favor of a GitHub link-out, which is stronger evidence than pretending every seam must keep the same shape. "It works on my machine" becomes a property of the contracts and tests, not a promise that every dependency has already been replaced.

View all slidesOpen display
← PreviousNext →
Contact us — support@neonlaw.orgTransparency & public disclosures
  • Neon Law Foundation
    5150 Mae Anne Ave Ste 405-9999, Reno, NV 89523

Neon Law Foundation is a Nevada nonprofit corporation and a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. It does not practice law and cannot represent you.

Nothing on this site is legal advice, and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship.

© 2026 Polin Shook & Neon Law