Most Rust in Production stories are about scale and performance. This one is a story about low-cost phones and patchy mobile connections in Africa, where a student is learning maths over WhatsApp. The whole point is to support hundreds of thousands of students cheaply enough to run at government scale.
My guest is Dylan Brown, a Senior Engineering Manager at Rising Academies, and he comes at Rust from an angle of being the person who signs off on using Rust for a new project.
For Dylan, it's about what Rust enables: lower compute costs, boring deployments, painless refactors, and code reviews that focus on business logic instead of null checks.
About Rising Academies
Rising Academies is an education company founded in Sierra Leone in 2014 during the Ebola crisis. It helps governments deliver better learning at scale, working with and through national public school systems. Across seven randomized controlled trials, students in Rising-supported schools have learned on average 2.4x faster each year than their peers. Today Rising supports more than 400,000 students across 1,400 public schools in West and East Africa. Its technology group builds WhatsApp-based tools designed for the realities of limited connectivity and low-cost devices, including Rori (a maths tutor) and Tari (a teacher assistant).
About Dylan Brown
Dylan Brown is a Senior Engineering Manager at Rising Academies, where he leads the development of educational tools deployed across several African countries. He has over a decade in software development and years of experience with conversational systems, from public-transport data in South Africa to a fintech company whose chatbots handled millions in transactions. He now focuses on building trustworthy, accessible technology for resource-constrained environments, and it was Dylan who led the decision to adopt Rust for a new part of Rising's stack.
Links From The Episode

• Why I like Rust as an Engineering Leader - Dylan's blog post about the project
• axum - The ergonomic, Tokio-based web framework powering the backend
• sqlx - The async, pure-Rust SQL toolkit with compile-time checked queries
• cargo-xtask - Instead of writing Python scripts for your project, you can just write Rust scripts
• pydantic - A Python package that forces you to care about types in Python, coincidentally partially written in Rust
• Postman - A graphical API client useful for writing end-to-end tests
• Bruno - An open-source alternative to Postman
• turn.io - A platform for building WhatsApp-based apps

Official Links

• Rising Academies Website
• Rising Academies Careers
• Dylan Brown's Blog
• Dylan Brown on LinkedIn