The document is an agenda for a discussion between the CTO and founder of Ockam, Mrinal Wadhwa, and the CTO and founder of InfluxData, Paul Dix, about rewriting products using the Rust programming language. It includes an introduction of the founders, an overview of the discussion topics like why they decided to rewrite in Rust and the challenges they faced, how they got their engineers comfortable with Rust, tips they learned in the process, benefits gained from moving to Rust, and how their communities responded to the switch.

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Meet the Founders: An
Open Discussion About
Rewriting Using Rust
Mrinal Wadhwa | CTO and Founder, Ockam
Paul Dix | CTO & Founder, InfluxData
June 2023

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Anais Dotis-Georgiou
Developer Advocate
LinkedIn

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Meet the Founders
Mrinal Wadhwa | CTO, Ockam
Mrinal Wadhwa is CTO and Founder at Ockam. He is
passionate about Distributed Systems, Applied
Cryptography, and Programming Languages. At Ockam,
Mrinal and his team are building open source tools to
help developers build secure-by-design applications
that can Trust all Data-in-Motion.
Paul Dix | CTO & Founder, InfluxData
Paul is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build
software for startups, large companies and
organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson
Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the
series editor for Addison Wesley s Data & Analytics
book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book
Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for
Addison Wesley s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine
Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members.
Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia
University.

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Product Overview

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Why did you decide to re-write in Rust? What
challenges were you facing?

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Rewriting an entire product in a new language
is a huge undertaking
Tell us about the process.

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How did you get your engineers comfortable
with Rust?
Tell us about hiring, training, and building a
team with Rust coding skills.

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Share some tips and tricks you learned along
the way.
Organization tips, Rust tricks, etc

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What benefits have the organizations gained
from moving to Rust?

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How have your communities responded to the
switch to Rust?

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Q&A

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T H A N K Y O U