Blazing Fast, Minimal Change - Speed Up Your Code by Refactoring to Rust

What is it you're working on today?

Today, I'm an engineering manager at OneSignal. I manage a team of six folks who write internal gRPC services and Kafka consumers in a mixture of Rust and Golang as depending on the performance needs and software needs of the project. The most exciting thing that we're working on right now is probably OneSignal's Journeys Project. Journeys Product, which just had its first public release a few weeks ago. It's an event driven system that allows our customers to use a very simple drag and drop interface to make very intricate, no code pipelines for how to message their client. So send this message wait X time. If they did click the message, send this other message. If they didn't click it, send that other message and it can get very large. And the whole thing is based on an event driven system that's maintained by my team.

What are your goals for this session?

In this session, I hope to educate people on how they can more easily speed up their existing monolithic software that's sitting out there, something like Python or Ruby. By adding in just a little sprinkling of Rust in the key places, and I hope to meet some interesting people in London.

And what would you like people to walk away with after they attend your session?

I would like people to walk away with an appreciation for how small a delta they can make in the code with how large of a performance benefit that could come out of it. It's really tempting to think like, Oh, we want this thing to be faster, we need to rewrite the entire world in Rust or Go or some new programming language, whatever. But I think the reality is, if you identify the hotspot you swap out the slowest code for the fastest code, then you can have a real difference with a small amount of effort.