RustWeek Interview: Aissata 'Ai' Maiga, Senior Software Engineer

At RustWeek 2026, the Rust Project Content Team talks with Aïssata "Aï" Maïga, Senior Software Engineer, about embedded Rust, teaching, and qualifying the Ferrocene compiler for safety-critical use. Aï shares how she found Rust: an embedded CS course, a robot built on a PIC32, a friend's recommendation, and a rewrite of that robot in Rust that led her into the embedded Rust community. Topics include: - Watching the embedded Rust ecosystem grow from register-level programming to HALs, PACs, and mature libraries - Building training materials on the nRF52, STM32, and the Espressif Rust board (ESP32-C3): start with something that works, then upgrade step by step with RTIC, DMA, and PPI, ending with data sent over Bluetooth Low Energy - Why Rust can work as a first programming language, and why "Rust is so hard" is mostly a myth: programming is hard, and Rust pays you back for the upfront effort - Treating Rust as a tool rather than an identity, and the "15% of Rust" rule: most programs only need a small slice of the language - Qualifying the Ferrocene compiler for safety-critical fields like automotive, medical devices, and avionics: annotating compiler tests against the language specification, certifying a subset of libcore, and contributing fixes back upstream - PR rotation on Ferrocene: pulling in upstream Rust changes daily so a qualified compiler ships every 12 weeks with all the bug fixes and modern language features - How to get involved: Espressif and Ariel OS both welcome new contributors, and Ariel OS gives priority to new contributors Aï's RustWeek 2026 talk, "The trials of qualifying Rust": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5VPSUQF1q0 Links and resources: - Aï on GitHub: https://github.com/Dajamante - RustWeek 2026: https://2026.rustweek.org/ - Rust Embedded Working Group: https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg - Embedded Rust Matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#rust-embedded:matrix.org - RTIC (Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency): https://rtic.rs/ - Espressif Rust board (ESP32-C3): https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-rust-board - esp-hal, now at 1.0 and no_std: https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-hal - Embedded Rust training for Espressif chips: https://github.com/esp-rs/std-training - James Munns: https://github.com/jamesmunns - Ferrocene, the qualified Rust compiler: https://ferrocene.dev/ - Ferrocene on GitHub: https://github.com/ferrocene/ferrocene - The FLS, the Rust language specification contributed to the Rust Project: https://github.com/rust-lang/fls - Ariel OS: https://github.com/ariel-os/ariel-os - STM32CubeMX, the C tool Aï wants an equivalent of in Rust: https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubemx.html Interested in contributing to embedded Rust? As Aï says: embedded is hard, programming is hard, but embedded Rust is extremely rewarding. The community will help you along the way. Interview conducted by Pete LeVasseur on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team. Find Pete at: - https://github.com/PLeVasseur/ - https://bsky.app/profile/petelevasseur.com