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TRACK 01

RUST BACKEND
ENGINEER

Master reliable, low-latency distributed systems using the core Rust toolchain.

01

FOUNDATIONS & OWNERSHIP

Deep dive into memory safety, lifetimes, and zero-cost abstractions. Understanding the borrow checker is the price of admission.

Box<T>BorrowingLifetimes
book

The Rustonomicon ch1–4

Ownership, lifetimes, subtyping, variance. The authoritative deep reference. Read straight through — don't skip to unsafe sections yet.

doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/
video

Crust of Rust — Lifetimes & Variance episodes

Jon Gjengset's YouTube series. Watch 'Lifetime Annotations' and 'Subtyping and Variance' back to back. Each is 2–3 hrs of building real code.

youtube.com — Crust of Rust playlist
book

Rust API Guidelines

Naming conventions, error types, iterator design, doc-tests. Read before writing any new public-facing code or OSS contributions.

rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/
book

Rust for Rustaceans — ch1–3, ch10

Ch1–3: types, memory, traits at senior level. Ch10: async internals and cancellation safety. The book senior Rust engineers keep open during code review.

nostarch.com/rust-rustaceans
02

ASYNC & CONCURRENCY

Leverage the power of Tokio. Multi-threading without the fear. Build a high-throughput runtime executor.

TokioFuturesArc & Mutex
book

Asynchronous Programming in Rust

Free official book. All chapters — futures, wakers, executors, async/await internals. You need the mental model of what Tokio is doing under the hood.

rust-lang.github.io/async-book/
book

Tokio Tutorial — all sections

Build the mini Redis clone end-to-end. Covers tasks, channels, select!, graceful shutdown, shared state.

tokio.rs/tokio/tutorial
book

thiserror + anyhow — idiomatic error handling

Read the Shuttle.rs error handling guide. Then refactor existing code to use thiserror for library errors and anyhow for application errors.

docs.shuttle.rs/resources/error-handling
project

proptest + criterion — benchmarking practice

Add property-based tests (proptest) and benchmarks (criterion) to your existing repo. Directly maps to interview questions about testing discipline.

proptest-rs.github.io
03

WEB SERVICES & PROTOCOL

Designing type-safe APIs with Axum and gRPC. Integrating with PostgreSQL and Redis using SQLx for compile-time verified queries.

AxumTonic (gRPC)SQLx
book

Zero To Production In Rust — full book

The single most important practical resource. Builds a real email service: Actix-Web, SQLx, PostgreSQL, Docker, CI/CD, integration tests, telemetry.

zero2prod.com
repo

tonic — gRPC in Rust

Work through helloworld and routeguide examples fully. Then add a gRPC status endpoint to your projects so you have a real reference.

github.com/hyperium/tonic
repo

SQLx — compile-time checked queries

Read the SQLx docs fully — migrations, transactions, connection pooling, prepared statements.

github.com/launchbadge/sqlx
project

Build: Rust distributed task queue

Axum API + SQLx/PostgreSQL job store + Tokio worker pool + gRPC status endpoint. Implement at-least-once delivery, retries, dead-letter queue.

sqlx examples as starting reference

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