The backstory

I’ve been a backend developer for over a decade — mostly in the JVM ecosystem. Java, Kotlin, Scala. I know these languages well and they’ve served me fine. So why rewrite my personal blog in Rust?

Performance that actually matters

A personal blog doesn’t need to be fast. But fast is still nice. My Rust server handles every request in under 5ms, uses 10MB of RAM at idle, and compiles to a single binary I can scp to a VPS.

Compile-time correctness

Rust’s type system caught bugs I didn’t know I had. Missing fields in a template? Compile error. Invalid SQL at build time? Compile error (thanks, sqlx). This is the kind of safety net I wanted.

The verdict

If you’re comfortable with a steep learning curve, Rust is an excellent choice for server-side web work. The tooling is mature, the ecosystem is surprisingly complete, and the resulting binary is a joy to deploy.