Rust NYC Monthly Meetup

For our second meetup of 2025, and we have Alex Kesling, a co-founder from Empathic, as our speaker!

Come learn how you too can turn anything into a database!

What does it take today to cobble together a "novel" database in Rust from crates lying around? It turns out one can "kitbash" a DB with Apache DataFusion and just a few crates.

Apache DataFusion is a highly concurrent query engine based on Apache Arrow. It represents a new category of database technologies: "deconstructed databases". DataFusion is to databases much like LLVM is to compilers: fundamentally pluggable and reusable.

Alex Kesling is the cofounder of Empathic, a new company exploring the intersection of enterprise data infrastructure and agentic AI. He previously worked on Google's Search and Knowledge Graph infrastructure, VR/AR tools for teachers, and a plethora of consulting projects. Alex loves systems design, time series visualization, distributed systems, and that one turkey sandwich the day after Thanksgiving.

Come on down to the Materialize HQ! Doors open at 6:30pm to give people plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and then Alex's talk starts at 7:30!

It should be a good time! Hope to see you there!