But this comes with a lot of problems and hard-to-identify bugs. In this talk we will discuss how thread safety works in principal, what mechanisms the hardware gives us to ensure data correctness, and finally how Rust uses these techniques to make writing "data race" bugs impossible!

Code examples from the talk: https://git.irde.st/kookiespace/talks/rust-day

Talk description

Katharina will give an introduction to async programming as a concurrency development model, (and what advantages this model has), the history and development of async Rust, how it works under the hood, and finally highlight a few projects from the current async Rust ecosystem in 2021.

Speaker’s bio

Katharina is an independent software researcher living in Berlin, focusing their research on distributed networking and routing. They work on a mesh networking platform called Irdest, and also work freelance jobs for companies building distributed systems in Rust.
They’ve been an active member of the Rust community since late 2017 and are a member of the CLI working group and community team.

Check out the project here: https://github.com/ockam-network/ockam

People talk about cost in software development. We know about runtime cost, compile-time cost, and even monetary-cost. People are aware that all of these are metrics that are important when discussing productivity.

What about the human cost?

What causes people to burn out, why do we work in an industry where everybody only ever focuses on “productivity” and what really needs to happen to stop any of this from happening.

Internet communication has become nearly ubiquitous in our lives, most of which is happening via centralized services and infrastructure. It might even sometimes seem like there's no real alternative to staying in touch with people this way. And while maybe not relevant to everyone’s everyday life, at times of crisis relying on centralized services and infrastructure can become dangerous. During the 2011 internet blackout in Egypt and more recently, in Hong Kong during the 2019 protests, Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, was DDoSed and resulted in activists and protestors losing their ability to organize. It was the former event that inspired the creation of an ad-hoc communication app, called "qaul.net"!

Decentralized infrastructure and services are a reality that save lives and enable people to communicate freely, without government censorship or surveillance. In this talk we will cover some of the projects in existence and technologies in use. Finally, we will talk about the future of qaul.net, and how an aging codebase is being re-written in Rust to make it more secure, scalable, and future-proof!