The Day Shakshi Brought Rust Into Our Codebase — and HR Into Our Inbox

AlgoWing

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13 hours ago

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It all started on a Monday morning, which already makes it suspicious.
Our team stand-up was barely over when Shakshi, our “10x engineer” (self-proclaimed, not HR-verified), casually dropped:

“So… I spent the weekend rewriting our service in Rust.”

Silence. Then Slack exploded.

We were a Java + Spring Boot shop. Our entire infra, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment scripts were married to the JVM. Suddenly, Rust had just eloped with our microservice without asking for our blessing.

The First Demo

Shakshi shared his screen like a proud parent showing baby pictures.

Here’s our old Java code that parsed incoming JSON requests:

// Java (Spring Boot)
@PostMapping("/process")
public ResponseEntity<String> process(@RequestBody Request req) {
    return ResponseEntity.ok("Processed: " + req.getId());
}

And here’s what she replaced it with in Rust:

// Rust (Actix Web)
#[post("/process")]
async fn process(req: web::Json<Request>) -> impl Responder {
    format!("Processed: {}", req.id)
}

Honestly? It looked slick.
Blazingly fast. Memory safe. No null pointers.