Why am I diving into Rust?

Recently, I’ve been laid off. The company, Woodside AI, that I had just joined, in January 2026, collapsed 60 days after my first day.

This is a bummer obviously because this idea of a venture studio always appealed to me: explore ideas just enough, with real product being built, and build companies around the explorations that are fruitful.

But that event sort of gave me a kick in the butt: for the past few years, my engineering skills kind of have stagnated. I tend to attribute this to becoming a dad, but I see plenty of great engineers are also dads, so let’s say I was just slacking.

Today, I’m diving into Rust. I wrote some Rust, a few years ago, while at Disney, but it was only a very small web server project to be used as a baseline in a performance benchmark for the library my team was working on.

But after many years of listening to the Oxide and Friends and the On the Metal podcasts, I came to the realization that I really want to move closer to hardware. I absolutely love those stories where y’all are describing how one bit here, or an interrupt at the wrong timing here, can throw things off and how exciting the journey to figure out the source of the error is.

My goal: learn Rust, during my time off, and take a shot at applying for a dream job at Oxide Computer.

This is no small feat, as I think my resume is really outside of what they are looking for, but eh, I won’t know if I don’t try it.

So today, I decided to take on a small project: rewrite some code I have written, years ago, that is still running to this day and rewrite in Rust. There is no other reason other than to learn. The code is running fine, but that gives me a baseline and it’s written in a very different language, Scala, so I can’t just port the code easily.

Lots of things are going to change. Furthermore, when I wrote this code, I was very much learning Scala, and software engineering at the same time. So trust me when I say this is very much over engineered and poorly written.

Anyway, all that to say that I’m starting a series where I dabble into Rust.