It is that time of year again. The cookies are stale, the wrapping paper is in the recycling bin, and your engineering team is coming back from the holiday break with dangerous ideas.

There is a specific kind of danger that lurks in the quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s when developers finally have time to read Hacker News, watch YouTube conference talks, and convince themselves that the legacy codebase that pays their mortgage is a burning pile of garbage that must be rewritten immediately.

This year, the flavor of the month isn't a JavaScript framework. It’s not Microservices. It’s Rust.

I know you’ve seen the headlines. Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in Rust. The White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report effectively telling us all to stop using C++ and C because they aren't "memory safe." Linux—the very heart of open source—has accepted Rust into the kernel. The hype train isn't just leaving the station; it has broken the sound barrier.

If you listen to the Silicon Valley echo chamber, Rust is the messiah. It promises memory safety without garbage collection. It promises fearless concurrency. It promises to solve bugs before you even run the code.

But we aren’t in Silicon Valley. We are in the Susquehanna Valley. And down here, gravity works a little differently.

Let’s look at the reality on the ground. In Central PA, our tech ecosystem is dominated by three giants: Manufacturing, State Government, and Healthcare.

In San Francisco, "Move Fast and Break Things" is a philosophy. In York, if you "break things" on a production line, physical machinery stops, unions get involved, and you lose $50,000 an hour. In Harrisburg, if you break a state agency system, you end up on the front page of the Patriot-News. In Danville or Hershey, if you break a system, patient care is impacted.

We value boring. We value stability. We value the fact that I can hire a developer from a local college who knows Java or C# and have them productive in two weeks.

The argument for Rust is undeniable on paper. It eliminates entire classes of bugs (buffer overflows, use-after-free errors) that have plagued C and C++ for decades. For Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, rewriting critical infrastructure in Rust makes sense. They have billion-dollar R&D budgets, and they are building the plumbing of the internet.

But you? You are likely building a CRUD API that moves insurance claims from a SQL database to a React frontend. You are building an inventory management system for a warehouse in Carlisle.

Does your inventory system need to be "memory safe" at the kernel level? Or does it just need to work by next Tuesday?

Let’s talk about the cost that the hype ignores: The Learning Curve.

I have been writing code for a long time. I have seen languages come and go. Rust is different. It is difficult. Not "tricky" difficult—I mean "bang your head against the desk" difficult.

The core feature of Rust is the "Borrow Checker." It is the compiler’s way of enforcing memory safety rules. It forces you to explicitly define who "owns" a piece of memory at any given time.

In C# or Java (the languages that run 90% of Central PA), the Garbage Collector acts like a benevolent janitor. You make a mess (allocate memory), and eventually, the janitor comes by and cleans it up. You don't have to think about it.

In Rust, there is no janitor. You are the janitor. And the compiler is an angry health inspector standing over your shoulder, screaming at you if you try to touch a variable that you lent to another function.

I have seen senior engineers—people with 15 years of experience—spend three days trying to write a linked list in Rust. Three days. In C#, that takes ten minutes.

If you introduce Rust into your organization, you are not just changing syntax. You are accepting a 40% drop in velocity for the first six months while your team fights the compiler. Can your roadmap survive that? Can your Product Manager?

Here is the biggest risk that no one talks about in the YouTube tutorials: Talent density.

If you build your mission-critical application in C# (.NET Core), and your lead developer gets hit by a bus (or, more likely, gets a remote offer from a fintech in NYC), you can post a job on LinkedIn and find 50 qualified candidates in the outcome of a 30-mile radius of Harrisburg.

If you build that same system in Rust, and your lead developer leaves? You are in trouble.

There is no deep bench of Senior Rust Engineers in Mechanicsburg. You will be forced to hire expensive remote contractors or try to train a junior dev who will struggle with the concepts. You are creating a "Bus Factor" of 1. You are building a silo that only the "High Priests of Rust" can enter.

In our market, maintainability relies on hireability. If the average developer graduating from Penn State or HACC can’t read your code, you have built technical debt, not a technical asset.

So why is your team asking for it?

Be careful. Often, the push for Rust isn't coming from a business need. It’s coming from Resume Driven Development (RDD).

Your developers are smart. They know that Rust is the highest-paying language on the Stack Overflow developer survey. They know that having "Production Rust" on their CV opens doors to high-paying remote jobs.

They aren't suggesting Rust because it’s the best tool to parse that CSV file for the HR department. They are suggesting it because they want you to pay for their education so they can get their next job.

I’m a cynic, I know. But I’ve been around long enough to know the difference between engineering constraints and career climbing.

Am I saying Rust is bad? Absolutely not. It is an engineering marvel. It is efficient, robust, and incredibly secure. But like a high-end table saw, it is a specialized tool, not a butter knife.

Here is the breakdown of when you should actually consider it in our region:

When Rust is actually good (The "Use It" Case):

When Rust is a trap (The "Don't Use It" Case):

I know how this meeting is going to go. You are going to try to explain this to your team. The Junior Dev is going to talk about "Zero Cost Abstractions." The Tech Lead is going to talk about "Memory Safety." The PM is going to ask why the login page is taking three weeks to build.

I want to arm you for that battle.

I have created the "Rust Reality Check" Decision Matrix. This is a one-pager designed to cut through the philosophical arguments and get to the business reality.

It asks three simple questions regarding Garbage Collection, Team Maturity, and Component Lifespan.

Download it. Print it out. Bring it to the architecture review.

When someone proposes a rewrite, put this flowchart on the table. Make them trace the line. If they can’t get to "Outcome C" without lying, the answer is No.

(Note: The download link is available below for Digizenburg Dispatch subscribers. Support local, pragmatic tech journalism and get access to the full archive of decision matrices.)

I want to hear from the trenches. Is anyone actually running Rust in production in the 717 or 570 area codes?

And I don’t mean a side project you run on a Raspberry Pi in your basement. I mean code that, if it broke, would cause Morgan (our lovely proxy for business leadership) to call you at 3 AM.

Reply to this email. If you are making it work, I want to know how you handled the hiring. If you tried and failed, I want the autopsy report.

Don’t let the hype dictate your architecture. Your job isn’t to use the coolest tools; your job is to keep the lights on and the data flowing.

Here's to challenging the hype, adapting the tool, and connecting with your craft.

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