If you look for "Rust adoption" in your favorite search engine, most of the content you'll find falls into one of two categories:
- How to convince your organization to adopt Rust, usually from the point of view of an individual contributor acting as a Rust advocate
- Survey data on Rust adoption
We feel there's a missing playbook: you are in charge of an engineering organization/unit, and you have determined that Rust is a good technology to bet on. How do you turn that bet into a success?
This article is our attempt at filling that gap.
anchorTable of contents
- Building a team for your first Rust project
- Scaling up your team
- Wrapping up
- Appendix: Learning resources
anchorBuilding a team for your first Rust project
You have a meaningful project in mind, and you are considering using Rust for it. It's time to build a team!
anchorShould you hire?
We recommend not to hire additional staff for your first Rust project.
If you go on the job market looking for production Rust expertise, you'll be competing with the entire industry for a very limited pool of candidates. It may take you months to find and onboard the right people: can your budget and project timeline afford that?
Furthermore, it's dangerous to bring people on board for a "Rust job": the technology might not be a good fit for your organization in the end. You don't want to end up with a team of frustrated Rust experts with no projects to work on: it's not going to be a great experience for anyone involved.
anchorAssess the readiness of your existing team
Unless you are a tiny startup, you already have a team that has been working with other technologies up until now. Can they be productive with Rust? How long will it take them to get up to speed?
Assessing their readiness is a key step in determining how to move forward.
anchorPrevious experience with Rust
First and foremost: look out for the hidden Rust experts in your team. They might be using Rust in their spare time, or they might have been using it in previous jobs. They can be an invaluable asset for the rest of your team, and you should make sure they are involved in the project from the beginning.
Be careful though: staffing your entire project with Rust experts might not be a great idea in the long run. You want to make sure that the codebase is accessible to people with less experience with Rust, and that the knowledge is shared across the team: that's going to happen organically if you add a few Rust novices to the mix.
anchorLanguage proximity
You might not have a hidden Rust expert in your team, but there might be others with experience in languages that are close enough to Rust to allow them to reach productivity quickly.
C and C++ are obvious candidates, but don't discount functional languages: there is more than memory management to Rust's learning curve! Having to manage nullability (Option) and failures (Result) as types is a paradigm shift: previous experience with functional languages can smooth the transition significantly.
anchorWillingness to learn
We like to joke about developers spending most of their time chasing the "next shiny thing", but don't take that attitude for granted. Is your team excited about the prospect of learning a new language? Are they willing to go through the discomfort of being a beginner again?
Don't assume "yes" as the answer. Talk to your team, and make sure that they are on board with the idea.
This will become less of a factor once you have one or two successful Rust projects under your belt, with a mature infrastructure and established code practices, but it's a key aspect to keep in mind for your very first project.
anchorUpskilling your team
If you found enough Rust experts in your existing organization to staff your team, you can skip this section.
We'll assume the most common scenario: you have one or two people in your team who have played with Rust in their spare time, building a few toy projects, but nobody with production experience.
How do you get them up to speed?
anchorSelf-guided learning
There are a lot of great resources out there to learn Rust at your own pace.
We recommend a mix of books and hands-on exercises: you can end up spending a lot of time reading about Rust, convincing yourself that you are "getting it", just to end up with a blank page when you try to write the first non-trivial program on your own.
We have collected a vetted list of resources in the Appendix.
anchorTraining
Self-learning can play out beautifully, but it may take a while.
If you don't have the luxury of time, you can speed up the learning process by finding external mentors for your team.
Workshops are the most common solution.
If you have a large team, you can bring in a trainer to run a dedicated workshop. If the team is small, you can buy tickets to join a public workshop alongside developers from other companies.
Interactivity is the key here: you want to make sure that your team has the opportunity to ask questions to an experienced Rust mentor to speed up the learning process and avoid common pitfalls.
To get a sense of what kind of topics a Rust workshop could cover, you can check out the Rust workshops that we offer here at Mainmatter.
anchorTeam reinforcement
If the project is important enough, you might want to consider augmenting your team with one or two experienced Rust consultants. Embed them in your team: they'll be working alongside your engineers, helping them get up to speed, steering the project away from common pitfalls, and make sure that the codebase is built on solid foundations.
It allows you to compress the timeline significantly: you can start delivering value while your team is learning Rust.
anchorCode audits
If budget is tight, you can consider a code audit as a cheaper alternative to Team reinforcement: you hire a consultant for a limited amount of time (e.g. a few days) to review your codebase.
At the end of the process, you get a report: critical issues that need to be addressed urgently, recommendations on how to improve the codebase, and a list of best practices that you might want to follow going forward. It becomes a technical roadmap that your team can integrate into their future planning.
Alternatively, you can engage with a consultant before starting the project: they can help you with the initial design and architecture, putting you on the right track. They can then pop in again, at regular intervals, to assess the situation and provide guidance if the plan needs to be adjusted.
anchorScaling up your team
Congrats! You've completed your first Rust project: business is thriving, and you need to scale up your team to keep up with the demand.
If the demand spike is transient, you can hire contractors to help you out. If you expect the demand to be long-term, it's time to start hiring.
anchorThe state of the Rust job market
Hiring for Rust positions is easy, but attracting talent with Rust production experience is hard.
The language is fairly young and industry adoption has only picked up in the last few years, so there are few developers with Rust production horror stories to tell.
On the other hand, developers are excited about Rust: there are a lot of engineers willing to learn it if you can train them; they often won't be starting from scratch, having played with Rust in their spare time.
All the experience you've accumulated upskilling the team for your first project will come in handy here: you'll just need to repeat the process on a larger scale.
anchorJob boards
On top of the usual job boards, it pays off to advertise your open positions on Rust-specific channels. We recommend the following:
- Every six weeks, there is a Rust jobs thread on /r/rust. It's a great place to advertise your open positions! Go here for the latest thread at the time of writing.
- Rust-focused events are a great place to find Rust developers. You can find a list of upcoming events, covering both conferences and meetups, on This week in Rust.
There are also recruiting agencies who are starting to specialize in Rust. We don't have any specific recommendation at this point, but it might be worth doing your research.
anchorWrapping up
We've covered a lot of ground in this article, but we hope we've given you a good starting point for your Rust journey. If you have any questions, or if you'd like help with any of the topics covered in the article (training, team reinforcement, code audits, etc.) get in touch!
anchorAppendix: Learning resources
When it comes to books, we recommend one out of the following three as a starting point:
- The Rust Programming Language (aka "the book"): the official Rust book. It's a great introduction to the language, and it's kept up to date with the latest changes to the language.
- Programming Rust: compared to the Rust book, it assumes the reader is a more experienced developer, and it goes into more detail about the language internals.
- Rust in Action: a great mix of theory and practice, trying to teach the language by building a lot of small projects.
When it comes to exercises, you should check out: Rustlings and/or the Rust track on Exercism.
Once the team is up to speed with the basics of the language, the learning path will diverge depending on the type of software project you are building.
If you're dealing with embedded systems, The Embedded Rust Book is a great resource.
If you're building an API or other kinds of backend systems, check out Zero to Production.
If you need advanced Rust topics, Rust for Rustaceans and the Rustonomicon are the way to go.