PDX Rust

From Radio Waves to Pixels - Real-Time Visualizations with Rust and WebAssembly

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, May 14, 2026, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Fourth Avenue Building, 1900 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Luke Petherbridge

Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) let you capture raw radio signals with commodity hardware. Luke Petherbridge will discuss what it takes to process those signals and render a live, scrolling frequency display in a web browser using Rust, Leptos, WebGL2, and WebAssembly (WASM) using digital signal processing like the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). No JavaScript was harmed in the making of this software.

Hexadecimal Floating Point? Why? How?

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, April 9, 2026, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Fourth Avenue Building, 1900 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Jim Blandy

Why in the world would anyone want to write a floating-point number in hexadecimal? Is the '.' in such a number still a "decimal point", or is it a "hexadecimal point"? What would that even mean??

As it turns out, hex floating point literals are, if not strictly necessary, still pretty sweet when you get serious about numeric computation. The WebGPU Shading Language (WGSL), a cross-platform language for writing code to run on GPUs, supports hex floats, and as one of the maintainers of the Naga shader translator crate, Jim Blandy has to support them.

Tonight Jim will narrate the bit-fiddling derring-do and uncalled-for consistency and completeness he indulged in while reimplementing Naga's hexadecimal floating-point literal parsing code. It'll be geeky and obscure. But the truth is that floating-point arithmetic is actually much nicer and more predictable than people think, and getting that nasty decimal conversion out of the way makes that easier to see.

Implementing a Window Manager: developer workflows, C bindings, and Rust tooling

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, February 12, 2026, 7:00 PM PST · Portland State University, Fourth Avenue Building, 1900 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Ben Massey

An artist might paint their parent a picture, a sculptor may craft them a vase, but a programmer writes them an x11 window manager.

For Christmas of 2025, Ben Massey started on a project for his dad: an x11 window manager written in Rust. Development workflow is an important part of a programmer's life: we use these computer things quite a bit every single day, so basic usage of them should aid the creative process, rather than fight it. After some discussions on the topic of workflow, Ben decided that there were some needs not met by traditional window managers, and that it was worth taking a stab at a solution.

This talk will go over the project "pick-full-wm", which takes full advantage of the wonderful tooling offered to Rust like Cargo, and the niceties of aspects like memory safety and compiler rule enforcement. This will also naturally lead to topics of Rust bindings to C, and more general discussions of Linux and software development.

Toasty: An Easy-to-use Object-Relational Mapping for Rust

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, January 8, 2026, 7:00 PM PST · Portland State University, Engineering Building, room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Carl Lerche

An object-relational mapping (ORM) is a layer that lets you work with a database using native types instead of writing queries directly. In Rust terms, an ORM maps tables to structs, rows to struct instances, and columns to fields, handling serialization, deserialization, and query construction for you.

Toasty is an experimental new ORM for Rust that prioritizes ease of use. It supports both SQL databases as well as some NoSQL databases, including DynamoDB and Cassandra. Rather than hiding the database's capabilities, Toasty exposes features based on the target database.

Carl Lerche, Toasty's designer, is also the original designer of the Tokio asynchronous runtime library.

Rust Coding with AI

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, November 13, 2025, 7:00 PM PST · Portland State University, Engineering Building, room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Bart Massey

Bart Massey will lead a discussion and demo of using AI tools for creating and analyzing Rust code, as well as learning Rust concepts and their application.

Cross-Magic: personal projects, Rust games, and utilizing AI

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, August 14, 2025, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Engineering Building, room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Ben Massey

Being inspired by magic word squares after last month's talk, Ben Massey decided to craft a demo of an AI-powered crossword game using these word squares. Touching on approaches to personal projects, the state of generative AI usage in Rust, and front-end crate options: Ben is aiming to use this demo game to bring up some fun Rust topics.

Ben is a software developer at Portland design firm Downstream, who has made Rust his primary language for personal projects, and has always had an interest in interactive experiences.

Fast Finding of Magic Word Squares in Rust

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, July 10, 2025, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Engineering Building, room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Bart Massey

Bart Massey will talk about fast finding of Magic Word Squares in Rust.

Apache DataFusion: A Fast, Extensible, Modular Analytic Query Engine in Rust

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, May 8, 2025, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Engineering Building, room EB 102, 1930 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Mustafa Akur

In this talk, Mustafa Akur will take you behind the scenes of query execution with Apache DataFusion. You'll explore how queries are parsed, optimized, and executed, and gain insight into the architectural principles that make DataFusion fast, extensible, and modular. The talk will delve into the goals of the Apache DataFusion project, the problems it aims to solve in the modern data ecosystem, and why Rust is a key part in the story.

TetaNES: A Vaccination for Rust - No Needle, Just the Borrow Checker

2026-10-17T19:59:38Z

Thursday, April 10, 2025, 7:00 PM PDT · Portland State University, Fourth Avenue Building, 1900 SW 4th Ave, Portland, OR

Luke Petherbridge

Writing an emulator is easy right? Model each component, read game data from a ROM, start an update loop, and execute instructions. Good to go - except... hardware runs in parallel and has shared state everywhere. Rust has strict ownership rules and a borrow checker. What are we to do?

As far as beginner projects go for learning Rust, an emulator might seem ambitious, but by the time you're done, you'll no longer fear the borrow checker!

Luke Petherbridge will walk through the basics of how to architect an NES emulator in Rust and how to overcome a few of the challenges. He'll dive into some multi threaded code for how to efficiently pump emulated pixels to the screen using the winit and wgpu crates and to your browser using WASM and WebGPU. All without any unsafe code!