Tiago Ntalani

Tiago came in with a computer science engineering degree and a background in JavaScript, React, and Python. His entry point into Rust was a Bitcoin infrastructure program out of Nigeria, learning the protocol through a command-line client written in Rust. He assumed Rust was strictly a systems language, until a LinkedIn post about shipping full-stack web apps in Rust, front end, back end, and database, changed that.

He started self-taught, with the Rust book and GitHub repos, and the borrow checker and lifetimes were the first real wall. The full-stack angle is what made Rust worth the climb for him: one language and one type system from the database to the UI.

Tiago had written frontend and scripting code, never a server. The hardest part was not Rust syntax, it was the backend concepts themselves: routing, state shared across request handlers, and every ownership decision the borrow checker forces you to make explicit where Node.js and Express let you skip it.

His first full CRUD app on Axum and Leptos is where the pieces connected. Leptos felt familiar fast thanks to his React background, so the frontend became the stable ground while the Axum side carried the new concepts.

His capstone is an Airbnb-clone on Axum and Leptos. It takes the CRUD patterns from his first app and scales them into a larger codebase with multiple domains, routed pages and shared components, the kind of project he can walk an interviewer through end to end.

Building both sides in Rust means the listing types the server returns are the same types the components render. His take for other JavaScript developers: you need programming experience, not prior Rust.