Nix Your Bugs & Rust Your Engines #2

The following event is co-organized by Hackerstolz:

Nix Your Bugs & Rust Your Engines is a new meetup for people in the Rhein-Neckar region that are interested in Rust (the programming language), Nix (the package manager), or NixOS (the Linux distribution).

This time, it takes place at the RaumZeitLabor in Mannheim. All participants must adhere to our Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions, feel free to send us an email at nixrust@rheinneckar.events or contact us on Mastodon at @NixRust@rheinneckar.social. We also have a Matrix room: [#nixrust-hd:matrix.org.](https://matrix.to/#/#nixrust-hd:matrix.org)

Schedule (tentative):

• 18:00 - Open Doors
• 18:20 - Greeting
• 18:30 - Enola Knezevic of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ): Fighting cancer with Rust - How Rust is used at the DKFZ for handling highly sensitive health data in cancer research.
• 19:30 - Niklas Korz: Nix for Monorepos - How Nix can help building container images for many services of different programming languages in a monorepo.
• 20:00 - Networking and get together

Talk 1

Enola Knezevic is a software engineer, working as a research associate in Martin Lablans' group at the German Cancer Research Centre and the Medical Faculty Mannheim.

Biospecimens and high-quality clinical data are essential for cancer research. At the same time, health data is highly sensitive with regards to data protection, hence, instead of centralizing all the data, federated information systems enable researchers to locate and work with data/biospecimens having certain characteristics, e.g. specimen type, diagnosis, and molecular markers, across hospitals, countries, or even continents. At the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Germany’s largest biomedical research center, we develop, operate, and maintain such national infrastructures in hospitals and biobanks around Germany, Europe and the world, using 100% FLOSS. Recently, we have re-implemented and open-sourced key components in Rust with great benefits towards stability, safety and performance. In particular, we report on Beam, a distributed task broker for efficient communication across strict network environments, and Focus, a federated query dispatcher protecting patient privacy using differential privacy.

Talk 2

Niklas Korz is a co-founder of and technical lead at Alugha GmbH, the multilingual video platform and dubbing toolsuite from Mannheim.

At alugha, all development happens in a monorepo with many different packages and services in different programming languages. Managing CI pipelines for such a setup can be tricky and is often solved with a solution like Google's Bazel. Another alternative that has been gaining traction in recent years is Nix - the declarative package manager based on a pure, functional programming language. We use Nix to build all our packages and their dependencies in isolation, paving the way for granular caching. In the final step, Nix also allows us to build Docker-compatible OCI container images from these packages without ever entering a container runtime.