Rustikon 2026: Two Days, More Energy, and a Stronger Community
Rustikon 2025 got us off to a great start, but Rustikon 2026 raised the bar even higher. Last year, everyone agreed: "One day is not enough." We listened and transformed the experience into a full two-day event.
Looking back at the packed schedule and the electric atmosphere at the Polin Conference Centre in Warsaw (March 19-20), it’s clear this was the right move for our growing community.
Let’s get this party started
Day 1 kicked off with Andre Bogus (pictured below) and his session, "An Option? Have a slice!". Andre shared the fascinating journey of adding as_slice methods to libcore, proving that contributing to the compiler is accessible even without deep internal knowledge.
The momentum continued with Wojciech Kargul, who addressed the growing pains of private crates by demonstrating how CrabHub brings consistency to versioning and workflows.
Shortly after, Ciara R (pictured below). delved into the sometimes murky world of Procedural Macros 101, showcasing essential tools like cargo expand that turn "black magic" into manageable building blocks. To close the first morning block, Michal Wojtas and Superteam Poland ignited the stage with a high-energy Lightning Talk.
Following a quick coffee break, we shifted our focus to modern development workflows. Krzysztof Grajek wowed the crowd by demonstrating how to supercharge Axum development with Claude Code, emphasizing practical AI-assisted workflows.
We then went deeper into the hardware-software interface with Jon Gjengset (pictured below), who challenged our core assumptions in his deep dive, "Are mutexes slow?". To round out the morning, Bartłomiej Kuras explored the nuances of Existential Types, helping the audience navigate the "to impl or not to impl" dilemma in modern Rust.
The afternoon sessions maintained an exceptionally high technical standard. Aliaksandr Zaitsau shared his extensive experience contributing Link-Time Optimization (LTO) changes to major open-source projects, while Marek Grzelak and Mateusz Maćkowski provided a vital reality check on the RIIR (Rewrite It In Rust) movement, testing popular rewrites against their battle-tested predecessors.
Education remained a core theme as Paweł Szulc brought us back to fundamentals, recreating Karpathy's micrograd ideas entirely in Rust. After an inspiring Lightning Talk by Exein, Jesús Pérez (pictured below) shared his journey into Infrastructure Automation, explaining why Rust provides the safety infrastructure engineers need to finally "sleep at night."
The day’s stage sessions concluded with Kostiantyn Mysnyk exploring AI Agents in an Iron Cage, showing how Rust’s type system enforces safety guardrails, and an online session from Orhun Parmaksız, who introduced the crowd to the art of "Ratatuifying" the Rust package manager, Cargo.
Networking opportunities & afterparty
Between sessions, the networking area, supported by our main sponsors Helsing, Exein, and partner Superteam Poland, was the true heart of the event. After a full day of brain-melting code, the community moved to the Arco Club for the official afterparty.
Whether debating async runtimes over pizza or competing on the bowling lanes, these moments formed the "social glue" that makes Rustikon a developer favorite. Seeing world-class engineers celebrate their strikes (and gutter balls) together is exactly why we do this.
More inspiring speakers on the stage
Day 2 proved that "Rust fever" is spreading to every industry, from health tech to automotive. We started with Mateusz Charytoniuk, who demonstrated how to build a self-hosted LLM ecosystem featuring Paddler and Poet, proving that Rust is the ideal language for serving AI at scale.
Mateusz Maćkowski then returned to the stage together with Marek Grzelak (both pictured below) to examine the "unglamorous" but essential pain points of Rust web development, offering a roadmap for how the community is addressing them.
After another insightful Lightning Talk from Exein, Paweł Urbanek showcased the power of hotpath.rs, explaining how performance debugging with TUIs and LLMs compares to traditional profiling tools.
The variety of the second day continued to impress as Marcin Kulik guided the audience through building a working async runtime from scratch using only the standard library, proving that even the most complex concepts are approachable for "mere mortals."
Caroline Morton (pictured below) highlighted the human impact of our work. She explored what it means to write scientific software that meets the rigorous standards of health research. Following the lunch break, Mateusz Lenart provided a much-needed recruiter’s perspective on the current job market, revealing the behind-the-scenes skills that truly set a Rust developer apart.
The final block of the conference pushed our technical boundaries even further. Krzysztof Atłasik shared advanced tricks for cleaner declarative macros and offered a sneak peek at upcoming nightly features for macro_rules!. Frank Lyaruu (pictured below) then initiated the crowd into the art of CAN bus sniffing, showing how to connect to a car's "central nervous system" as an enthusiastic amateur.
Following a final Lightning Talk by Michał Wojtas (Superteam Poland), Vitaly Bragilevsky took us beyond println! and explained how DWARF/PDB debuginfo actually works in practice. Finally, Gaurav Gahlot mastered the art of concurrency with a deep dive into Rust Channels, closing our sessions with a masterclass in reliable concurrent programming.
Big thank you to our Sponsors & Partners
An event of this scale is truly a team effort, powered by visionaries who believe in the Rust ecosystem. A massive thank you to our main sponsors, Helsing and Exein, whose unwavering support for high-performance engineering made these two days possible.
We also want to highlight the contribution of Superteam Poland, whose partnership brought a unique, vibrant energy to the Polin halls and connected Rust with the wider builder community.
Rustaceans - you make this event unforgettable
We’ll remember the second Rustikon edition as a 48-hour celebration of code, community, and the future of safe, fast software. Whether you joined us for the expert talks, the networking, or the bowling strikes, you helped make this edition unforgettable.
Videos of all 20+ talks will be available on our YouTube channel soon. Until then, keep the conversation going on the event’s LinkedIn and X profiles.
Hope to see you in 2027!