Workshops
The perfect way to kick off Rust Nation UK with a focused workshop day.
This year we are working with Mainmatter, Ardan Labs and Alexandru Radovici to bring you three full-day training options.
All workshops take place on Wednesday 18th February 2026 at 1 America Square, the day before the Rust Nation UK conference, all course options run from 9am-5pm and include hands-on immersive training. Please bring your laptop and charging cable; power and WiFi will be available. Tickets include refreshments.
Rust at the Edge: AI Development. Edge Deployment. Real-world Inference
with Alexandru Radovici
Containers Are Dead: Long Live WebAssembly
with Jonas Kruckenberg from Mainmatter
Your backend services are functioning, but they're not performing optimally. Docker containers feel heavy, cold starts are slow, and your cloud bill keeps climbing. Security concerns keep you up at night, all while you're fighting the spaghetti-stack to deliver features on a tight deadline. You've heard WebAssembly is the future, but it seems confined to browsers - can it solve your server-side problems?
Yes, it can! WebAssembly is starting to power anything from safety-critical embedded applications to large-scale web services. Employed correctly, it gives you microsecond cold boot times, reliable sandboxing, safe user extensibility, and much more.
In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to build such an efficient, portable, and secure server-side application using Rust and WebAssembly. We'll cover everything from foundational concepts to cutting-edge features. By the end, you'll have built a microservice in Rust, compiled it to WebAssembly, and deployed it using cutting-edge tooling. You'll understand when this approach outshines containers, where the technology is headed, and how to incorporate these techniques into your existing infrastructure.
We assume you are familiar with Rust and have heard of WebAssembly, but we don't assume deep knowledge. We will provide a brief explanation and references whenever we rely on advanced features.
Async - Fundamentals to Advanced
with Herbert Wolverson from Ardan Labs
Abstract
Rust's async model is unique — combining memory safety with fearless concurrency and zero garbage collector pauses! In this intermediate-to-advanced workshop, we'll explore not just how to make async work, but how to navigate its murky corners with confidence.
We'll demystify await, task scheduling, and the underlying state machine system. Then we'll dive into building robust systems using actors, channels, and shared state — applied across Axum (HTTP), Tonic (gRPC), and custom protocols. Along the way, we'll tackle real-world challenges like recursion, dynamic lists of futures, implicit awaits, and backpressure. You'll also learn how to mix sync and async code without losing your mind.
Hands-on tasks include building async servers, actors, and basic observability tooling.
Async Rust doesn't have to feel like an afterthought — with the right patterns, it can feel as natural as Elixir.
Pre-requisites
A working Rust environment on your laptop. Familiarity with Rust, and at least "hello world" in async Rust.
Book your space
