Rustikon 2025 - summary & highlights

The first edition of Rustikon is officially behind us! It made a strong entry onto the tech scene with its energetic vibes, expert speakers, and a thriving community, all gathered in one place in the heart of Warsaw. Co-located and inspired by the Scalar Conference we’ve been organizing yearly for over 10 years, this event brought together developers, language enthusiasts, and Rust practitioners eager to learn, discover, and shape the future of the language.

So how did it go? Before diving into the summary we prepared, get the feel of the unique conference atmosphere with the video below 🦀

Workshop, talks & keynotes

The day before the conference, we gave the attendees an extra opportunity to expand their Rust knowledge hands-on through the Clippy Lint Implementer’s workshop with Andre Bogus. Known for his expertise in Rust tooling, Andre introduced participants to implementing custom lints and exploring the architecture behind Rust’s linting infrastructure.

Clippy Lint Implementer’s workshop with Andre Bogus

March 26 was an action-packed day with engaging talks, networking, and fun, showcasing Rust’s increasingly important role in industries. It started on a high with Andre Bogus’s interactive session (and him playing ukulele!), Streamlining Your Rust Life: Tips to Make Rust Development Easier, which was full of valuable tips to simplify Rust coding. Zainab Ali carried the enthusiasm forward with Reasoning with Async Rust, effortlessly decoding async programming to the delight of the audience.

The Rustikon’s agenda offered advice to new and old Rustaceans alike. Maciej Próchniak’s talk, 2 Years of Rust after 10 Years of Scala—The Good, the Bad and… Not So Ugly, hit very close to the heart of language-changing developers. Our Staff Software Engineer, Krzysztof Grajek, and his Rust Without Tears: A Guide to Avoiding Common Traps gave participants actionable tools to create cleaner, more secure Rust code.

Further that day, we had Wojciech Kargul with Unlocking the Full Potential of Cargo Extensions in Rust Development - full of insights into their implementation and benefits coming with it and Using CRDTs Beyond Text Editors by Oliver Wangler, who shared lessons learned from building a Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library with JSON semantics.

Afternoon sessions included A Better Way of Doing Async Rust by Piotr Jastrzębski, who explored methods to make asynchronous Rust programming more enjoyable and efficient, Embrace or Ditch the Async? by Michał Chodzikiewicz - a very pleasant comparison of synchronous and asynchronous implementations of the same IoT application, showing pros and cons of adopting asynchronous programming in microcontroller projects and Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) in Rust: Unknown Parts by Aliaksandr Zaitsau, sharing his experiences applying PGO to various software projects, highlighting hidden challenges and offering strategies to effectively leverage PGO in Rust for performance optimization.

We carried on with The Simplest Way to Build Resilient Applications by Francesco Guardiani, who discussed the use of Durable Execution to enhance application resilience, focusing on workflows, asynchronous tasks, microservice orchestration, and event processing. Afterward, Piotr Gankiewicz shared his insights from building Iggy.rs, discussing design decisions, challenges faced, and takeaways from over two years in Let’s Build Our Own Message Streaming Platform.

The very warmly welcomed Strongly Typed Financial Software by Michael Snoyman was the last but not least Rustikon's talk. Michael presented real-life examples of utilizing Rust features like traits, newtype wrappers, generics, and macros to develop robust financial software, demonstrating how these features contribute to application reliability and maintainability.

All of Rustikon’s talks will be available on our YouTube channel soon, so be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss them! Here's the playlist that we'll update regularly ⬇️

Networking & fun

Rustikon prioritized connections through its single-track style, rich interactions, and networking, but we also wanted to bring some fun experiences to the participants! That’s why we complemented the conference with some special attractions, including retro arcade games, an F1 racing simulator, and even an air tunnel!

This is Rustikon 🐉🦀 where we brought the speed of crypto to life - with F1 custom racing simulator, skydiving thrills and retro arcade vibes. High-performance tech, high-adrenaline energy. Let’s roll and connect with all the smart people attending!#Rustikonpic.twitter.com/mjlxTgxlZ4

— Wincent (@Wincent_co)March 26, 2025

We finished the event with an afterparty full of cool discussions, laughs, and chill after the long learning session at the conference! And if you want to see some more moments from the conference, see this album!

A glimpse into the Future

It was a pleasure attenting and speaking at @rustikonconf today in Warsaw. Thank you for an amazing gift, @softwaremill ! pic.twitter.com/Tz9KJyiHUo

— Piotr Jastrzebski (@haaawk_dev) March 26, 2025

With the 2025 edition, we started Rustikon’s history. We hope this inaugural event met the participant’s expectations - we already heard some voices that it did, and you can even read one of the event relations by PJATK students!

I really enjoyed the talks at Rustikon, but my favorite was “Let’s build our own message streaming platform” by Piotr Gankiewicz. I’ve been wanting to build something like Kafka or actually any messaging platform myself for a long time, but never had the chance to dive deep into it — this talk gave me a great peek into the real challenges behind it and a big shot of inspiration

Krzysztof Grajek, Staff Software Engineer, SoftwareMill

In creating Rustikon, we aim to make the best possible space for the community to learn, share insights, discuss Rust and its future, and maybe even shape it. This would also not have been possible without the support of our Sponsors - Helsing, Wincent & Exein whom we sincerely thank! We look forward to welcoming you all to Rustikon 2026!

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