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Mike Dabydeen on Rust, AI & Engineering Leadership

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🎥 DEV SPOTLIGHT
Mike Dabydeen Featuring: Mike Dabydeen • Developer

Developer Stories: Mike Dabydeen on Rust, AI & Engineering Leadership

Welcome to another episode of CoderLegion Developer Stories!

In this episode, Tom Smith sits down with Mike Dabydeen, an engineering leader and technology educator from Toronto, Canada.

Mike shares his experience across engineering leadership, enterprise APIs, Rust, systems programming, AI, DevOps, and SRE, as well as his perspective on building reliable software in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

🎥 Watch the Interview

▶️ Watch Mike Dabydeen's Developer Story on YouTube

💡 What We Discuss

  • 🦀 Rust & Memory Safety — Exploring Rust, ownership, borrowing, and safe systems programming
  • 🤖 AI & Reliable AI — Building and working with AI systems in real-world environments
  • ⚙️ Enterprise APIs — Designing and working with APIs at scale
  • 👨💻 Engineering Leadership — Lessons from leading engineering teams and projects
  • ☁️ DevOps & SRE — Reliability, automation, cloud, and modern engineering practices
  • 🎓 Teaching & Mentoring — Mike's experience sharing technology knowledge with the next generation of developers

👨💻 About Mike Dabydeen

Mike Dabydeen is an engineering leader who works across enterprise APIs, decentralized systems, systems programming, and AI.

He also teaches at Sheridan College and Conestoga College and is active in the developer community.

His technical interests and experience include Rust, AI, DevOps, SRE, Java, C, Python, C#/.NET, Go, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Docker, React, TypeScript, and more.

🌐 Visit Mike's Website

🎙️ Developer Stories

Developer Stories is a CoderLegion series featuring developers, engineers, technical leaders, and technology professionals from around the world.

We talk about their journeys, experiences, challenges, technologies, and lessons learned along the way.

👉 Join the CoderLegion community: https://coderlegion.com

Guest: Mike Dabydeen
Interviewer: Tom Smith
Series: CoderLegion Developer Stories

developer-stories #rust #ai #artificial-intelligence #software-engineering #engineering-leadership #systems-programming #devops #sre

20 Comments

•

Really interesting perspective on how Rust, AI, and engineering leadership intersect. How do you think Rust will shape the future of AI engineering?

4 votes
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@[Mehadi Hasan] Mostly in the layer around the model, not the model itself. Python will stay where training and research happen. Rust is showing up where the work runs over and over: Hugging Face's tokenizers library has a Rust core, and OpenAI's Codex CLI ships a Rust implementation, codex-rs. That's the same place I care about, agent harnesses and tool servers that run on small local hardware, where memory safety and low overhead decide whether it's usable. I expect more of that layer to move to Rust as people run agents locally and start paying attention to cost per run.

3
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Really appreciate this program and the valuable insights shared about Rust, AI engineering, and technical leadership. It’s inspiring to see how developers can learn, grow, and build better systems by sharing their experiences. Thanks for sharing such useful knowledge with the community!

3 votes
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@[nate] Thanks, nate. The part I'd point people to is the junior developer question around the 7 minute mark. Systems thinking is the answer I'd give any student worried about where AI leaves them.

1
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Really enjoyed this discussion. Great insights on Rust, AI engineering, and leadership. Appreciate the effort put into sharing practical experiences and perspectives with the developer community. Looking forward to more discussions like this.

3 votes
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@[Sitesh Pradhan] Thanks, Sitesh. Good to see you here after the git hooks thread. The permission boundary section (from about 9:46) is the practical version of what we were discussing there: keep the controls where something outside the agent can check them.

2
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Great insights on Rust, AI engineering, and leadership. Thanks for sharing your valuable experience and helping developers learn and grow.

3 votes
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@[Faisal Ashraf] Thank you, Faisal. That means a lot. Helping developers learn and grow is the part of this work I enjoy most, whether it's in a classroom at Sheridan or Conestoga or in threads like this one. If anything from the interview connects to something you're working on, I'm happy to help, so feel free to ask here anytime.

1
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it was a really eye opening interview, I appreciate the part where you encouraged system thinking because as software scales higher it becomes difficult to reap benefit if llm are given full automatic access since they can't handle scaling without expert supervision.

it's good to hear about rust ability to handle memory issues using the borrow checker, especially in this days where manual memory management can be difficult and buggy.

Thank you for sharing those amazing insights on current issues baffling new developers and existing ones.

3 votes
•

@[peter isaiah] Thanks Peter

1
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@[peter isaiah] Thanks, Peter. The borrow checker is a good model for the supervision part too. It doesn't depend on a senior engineer spotting a use-after-move in review; rustc rejects it with E0382 on every build, however confident the author was. With agents I'd aim for the same thing: put the limits that must hold in checks that run every time, and save the expert's attention for what a check can't decide, like whether the design is right in the first place.

0
•

@Mike Dabydeenb Thank you so much for this interview. And thanks a lot to @TomSmith for hosting this.

2 votes
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@[James Dayal] Thank you, James, and a big thank you to Tom Smith for hosting such a thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate you and the CoderLegion team giving developers a place to share their stories and learn from each other. It was a pleasure to be part of the series, and I'm grateful for the warm welcome everyone here has given it.

1
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Really insightful discussion. I appreciate how Mike connects Rust, AI engineering, and leadership. Combining technical skills with thoughtful decision making and continuous learning is essential for building reliable software. Keep sharing this valuable knowledge with the developer community.

2 votes
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@[Sascha] Thank you, Sascha, I really appreciate that. You put it well. Technical skill gets you part of the way, but the judgment about what to build, and when to slow down and check, matters just as much, and it keeps shifting as the tools change. I'll keep sharing what I learn, and if you're working through any of this yourself, I'm always happy to compare notes.

2
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Really inspiring insights. I appreciate how you connect Rust, AI engineering, and leadership. Building reliable AI systems takes strong fundamentals, thoughtful design, and continuous learning.

1 vote
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@[Daniel Decker] Thanks, Daniel. The fundamentals are the part I'd stress too. Most of the reliability in an agent system comes from the plain engineering around the model, like timeouts and permissions that something outside the agent checks.

2
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Really enjoyed this! Great insights on Rust, AI, and engineering leadership. Definitely worth the watch!

1 vote
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@[DuchessCodes] Thanks for watching. If one part is worth a second look, it's the junior developer question around the 7 minute mark.

1
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I've never used Rust, but I've read that it's a complex programming language and that many say it's safe because it runs exclusively on the backend. What about Node.js?

1 vote
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