SAFENetwork London: What is Crust? Nikita Baksalyar (MaidSafe)

** PLEASE NOTE: Change of venue! We are now at Campfire Shoreditch - next to Old Street roundabout. **

Welcome to the London SAFE Network meetup group. Each month we discuss the basics and new developments of MaidSafe's SAFE Network, with updates from the MaidSafe team.

Topic: 'What is Crust - and why does it Matter?'
Speaker: Nikita Baksalyar (Senior Rust Developer, MaidSafe)

Crust ('Connections in Rust') is an open-source networking library that forms the foundation of the SAFE Network. In other words, it's the way in which different nodes across the Network speak to each other in a peer-to-peer, decentralised way. In this talk, Nikita will explain what Crust is used for, why it's special and dive into a few of the findings from the recent Crust Test that saw people become involved all over the world.

Here are some useful links so you can familiarize yourself with Crust before the meetup:
https://safenetwork.tech/
https://www.safenetworkprimer.com/
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/safe-crossroads-45-approaches-to-alpha-3-with-nikita-baksalyar
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/safe-crossroads-46-connection-needs-of-an-autonomous-network-with-spandan-sharma
https://safenetforum.org/t/crust-test-v2-concluded/26053
https://safenetforum.org/t/crust-test-why-encryption-matters/26055
https://github.com/maidsafe/crust

We also have a last minute addition: Pierre Chevalier (leader of the Routing Team at MaidSafe) will also be giving a talk on the night:

Rust: Beyond The Language, An Ecosystem

As a language, rust gives you safety, performance and high level abstractions. This is more than any other language can claim in 2018. This is reason enough to use rust in performance and security critical projects such as the SAFE Network.

By using rust to implement PARSEC, a novel consensus protocol many orders of magnitudes faster than the blockchain, we were reminded that beyond the language, the entire rust ecosystem conspires to making your projects successful.

In this talk, we will use our experience writing production code in rust to convey all the benefits we received from being part of this inclusive ecosystem. Beyond the compiler and the great toolchain that comes with it, we will share concrete examples of many different aspects of the wider rust environment that make it so enjoyable to write production code with confidence.