RustConf 2025 Interview: Darko Mesaroš, Developer Advocate @ AWS

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the Rust Project Content Team talks with Darko Mesaros, developer advocate at AWS, about the sysadmin's path to Rust, the AWS SDK for Rust, coding assistants, and a lukewarm take about Python. Darko shares how a career of managing Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX systems (plus childhood Commodore 64 assembly) led through Python, Node, and Objective-C to Rust, and how it took three tries to burst through the borrow checker wall. Topics include: • Rust for the modern sysadmin: safe, fast, runs on anything, and great for building your own system utilities instead of taking tools off the shelf • The crate-fog problem for newcomers: Actix or Rocket or Axum? Rusoto or the official SDK? And why time will crystallize the ecosystem • Coding assistants and the young crate ecosystem: outdated answers like suggesting the deprecated dotenv instead of dotenvy • Inside the AWS SDK for Rust: generated from the Smithy layer, fully async on Tokio, typed errors you can match on, and paper cuts like S3 upload progress and DynamoDB's stringly-typed update expressions • Building his own Claude Code-style CLI assistant on Amazon Bedrock, in Rust, before the big assistants existed • The two extreme camps on AI coding tools, and the responsible middle: use the LLM to build and understand your code, never to replace understanding it • Why strongly typed languages like Rust pair especially well with LLM-generated code: it fails at compile time, spectacularly, before it reaches a customer Links mentioned: AWS SDK for Rust: https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-rust/ AWS SDK for Rust on GitHub: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-rust Amazon Bedrock: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/ Tokio: https://tokio.rs/ Serde: https://serde.rs/ SQLx, compile-time checked SQL: https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx dotenvy: https://crates.io/crates/dotenvy Interview conducted by Pete LeVasseur on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team.