Abstract
Most conversations about Rust centre on memory safety, performance, and systems programming.
This talk makes a different case.
It presents the story of Rori, a WhatsApp-based math tutor serving students in low-resource schools across six African countries, built by a small team at Rising Academies.
The talk covers the real engineering decisions made and lessons learnt to keep Rust idiomatic at system boundaries, the team's standards and best practices arrived at through much iteration, and the cost and sustainability consequences that made Rust the right choice for a non-tech organisation building software for the long game of Education.
It closes with a proposition to expand the audience's imagination for where and why we build with Rust.
