Rust NYC x OpenAI: Safer 'unsafe' & Barnum: The agentic workflow engine.
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Join us on Tuesday, April 28 at OpenAI NYC. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab food, drinks and socialize, and the talk begin at a slightly earlier start time of 7:05pm.
Robert Balicki, Staff Engineer at Pinterest
Barnum: The missing workflow engine for agentic workflows
Robert Balicki is a staff engineer at Pinterest, where he works on the Web Platform team and helps the company adopt GraphQL. He previously worked on the relay team at Meta. He organizes the Rust NYC meetup, and his side projects include Isograph, an opinionated, compiler-driven framework for building data-driven apps ([https://isograph.dev](https://url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/-dPfC28QZI8qn2VUnfXS5B1L8?domain=isograph.dev)), and Barnum, the missing workflow engine for agentic workflows ([https://barnum-circus.github.io](https://url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/pL3OC36P8T21LgXhqhJSQIMYc?domain=barnum-circus.github.io)).
Robert will be talking about Barnum, a programming language for expressing asynchronous, parallel workflows. Orchestrating agents? Well, that's an example of asynchronous work! So the raison d'être of Barnum is to make orchestrating agents a breeze.
We'll talk about why use a programming language (instead of English) to orchestrate agents, and how it's implemented. And then we'll go into some fun details — e.g. why build a language with support for algebraic effect handlers?!
Predrag Gruevski, Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI
Performance Wins at OpenAI Scale: Safer 'unsafe' with Codex and Miri
Predrag (https://predr.ag) is a performance engineer best known for his work on the cargo-semver-checks linter, the Trustfall query engine, and his blog post about debugging WiFi that only worked while it was raining. At OpenAI, Predrag works on distributed storage systems that power the training of frontier models.
At OpenAI Scale, every millisecond counts. Rust is phenomenal for this out of the box, but occasionally `unsafe` is necessary to squeeze out the last drops of performance from a system. This talk is a case study of how we used unsafe Rust, Codex, and miri to ship a tricky optimization in a massive distributed system. We went from idea to production in record time — since we used Rust, everything worked on the first try!
Lawrence Harvey is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support.
The space is generously sponsored by our partner OpenAI, who will have a number of their engineers from the Rust heavy teams present for you to mingle with and learn more about the Rust based projects they're currently building!