He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired

We were a team of six. Backend engineers juggling microservices, pipelines, devops patches, and postmortems that read like therapy notes.

Our stack was typical for a fast-moving startup:

• Node.js microservices
• Redis queues
• AWS Lambdas
• MongoDB for almost everything

We weren’t bad. We just weren’t fast. Services were functional, but brittle.

Some mornings, we’d all be staring at Datadog dashboards watching a queue backlog climb past 10k messages, waiting for garbage collection to catch up.

We were firefighting. Every day.

Then Kabir, the quietest one of us, said,

“I think I can rewrite this image pipeline in Rust.”

We all shrugged. Rewrites never survive.

But Kabir didn’t ask for help. He didn’t book design meetings or ask for estimations…