Notes from the first Rust AI meetup in Europe, at Adyen

So this is my recollection of the fantastic first Rust AI meetup that we held at ADN meeting offices in Amsterdam on September 9th, 2026, the night before Pydenta Amsterdam opened the next day. So our company like SAIL builds a complete implementation of the Spark ecosystem, Apache Spark ecosystem in Rust. So we built the engine, we built Iceberg, we built Delta and we built Catalog support directly in SAIL and we achieved tremendous speed up and much better efficiency that Apache Spark on JVM. So Rust native gives you 10 times the speed, it's 50% 50 times actually cheaper, right? But most importantly it's AI native for Python, Python is the language of AI and data science and Python UDFs, user-defined functions can run in Rust directly in Python 3 instead of crossing the JVM boundaries back and forth as they have to do in Spark with serialization deserialization. So, and ADN is one of the world's top payment processing financial services companies. It's processed a trillion dollars a year and its headquarters is in Amsterdam, it's a diamond sponsor of Pydata Amsterdam for many years and they found us by themselves. The folks who run Spark, as often is the case, found that Spark jobs don't finish in time. If they finish at all, they run out of memory and the engineers have a lot of problems running this kind of job. So they found SAIL, they tried it, they found huge success, they committed batches and we set up this meetup the night before the conference. And for me it's the veteran meetup funder and organizers always a fun challenge. How do you do a meetup in a new city? You know, in Bay Area I have many thousands of people in my ecosystem, they know me and basically have no problem filling up any kind of meetup. When we started Rust.ai at AWS Builderloft, we had I think 400 RSVPs and we filled out the place at probably 250-300, which is unheard of as the show to RSVP ratio. It exceeds kind of functional programming, distributed systems, traditional meetups and you know five times better than JavaScript or Genetic AI meetups where there are five events a night and everybody basically grabs RSVP without showing up. So I posted the meetup on Luma at first, it was not much traction. It's a new city, it's actually not the biggest AI community in Europe. It's behind Berlin and Paris and London. It's not the biggest market in Europe, it's a hub for certain, but I have fantastic partners. So the AI Foundry is a meetup which I met last year and I invited them to co-host it with me and we sent the invitations to our list. And also in 2018, I built a conference in Amsterdam called RethinkTrust, RethinkTrust.org. That was the first non-crypto conference on industrial and IoT blockchain, which was positioned as an OBS engineering event. And of course it was categorized as crypto by the media in events of the time. We were at the Berthin Berlayer and we had senior executives from multiple European leading companies such as Bosch, Siemens, KPMG, and KLM, and Shell in attendance. So I wanted to invite them as well. However, the website was built by my partners and it was long gone. So I kind of thought, how can I get my list back and how can I have my milestone back? So I just asked Claude and Codex to look at my Gmail and my Google Drive and they found all the design documents, all the layouts and all the transactions because I was a partner on the checkout. And so from that we restored everything. So now you can go to RethinkTrust.org, which is in the S3 bucket, as my most other conference sites, which are there forever. And the list was restored and I invited 500 people from the list in addition to 8000 people from our global list and more and the about, I think, 3000 people from the local meetups. And that was really full house. However, something happened. There were a few days before we went, we got kind of panicked signals from several people that September 9th will be the nationwide transportation strike in the Netherlands. And everybody's using public transportation in the Netherlands, they go by train and they go by bus and they go by trolley. So that kind of sounded like a judgment call. And of course, I will never back down. I will never back out. The event is in the books. Everybody is invited. And I have perfect trust in Amsterdamers who go by bike and who go on foot. And I was not wrong. Probably got half of the RSEPs. But given the strike, that was enormous. And I'm very happy that one of the folks who attended, Luca posted an amazing blog, recapping everything. We got a committee speaker, Robin Everard, to present Digital Sovereignty and Rust. And the program was fantastic. So the first talk was by Zemin, who is the software engineer at ADN. And he famously said that he used Spark for six years. He was at ADN for six years and he has a cat who is six year old. And he presented the use case. He presented why Spark was going slow, how sale fit the bill. And his talk was primarily from the Spark running angle. So it was really telling that sale could just come in and, as we say, with a single URL change, take over that complex job. So you have to look at the talk and enjoy the specific use case, which really gives you a detailed overview. So two days later at PyData Amsterdam, our own CEO Shehab Amin and Santos from ADN gave a different talk where they talked about the combination of Spark requirements at ADN at a more general level and how sale addresses it. And Santos talked more about the variety of stacks and the policies and the teams at a higher level than kind of individual engineering requirements for a job. And then it was very interesting to see that alternatives such as Pandas and Polars and whatnot were considered. However, moving there would change the established workflows of the dozens, hundreds of Spark jobs and require multiple teams to change the way they do things and sale can just slide in, improve performance without incurring that kind of change. So I think in combination, you have to look at both of these talks as extremely illuminating use case and the one of the biggest financial service providers in the world at huge scale. So that's really, really interesting. What I'm also very happy about is that both co-founders, Shehab Amin, the CEO, and Hiran Lin, the CTO, converged on the city and co-presented at the meetup. So Iran now lives in Shenzhen, China, and Shehab is my neighbor in East Bay, Bay Area, California, about 10 minutes away from me actually. So when the talk was accepted for by day at Amsterdam, they made the decision to bring the team together for the very first time in Amsterdam for an offsite. And we could meet each other. We have folks in Europe, America and Asia. So everybody converged. And it was a great, great way to align, get to know each other, prioritize different things that we do, building sale and doing the rollout and getting customers like ADIAN, which is really, really enormous validation that we are ready for the world. We come and fix problems which people actually have. They find us. So it was extremely encouraging and just looking how it solves the customer problem is I think one of the most rewarding experience for a systems builder. When you really build a system with high performance, with high compatibility requirements, our build for sale has to pass the whole Spark test suite, which is a requirement, which if you ever want to contribute to sale, you have to teach your agents to do that. It's a very elaborate process and a very elaborate document to train your agent. So we did that. And so Hiran and Shehab both gave a talk. There was some kind of audio malfunction on the local mic. I was recording with my own directional room mic, but also in the middle of the talk I had to put on some DJI mics on Shehab and Hiran. So hopefully you will see the audio is pleasing after a little bit of the initial kind of hiccups. And at Padete Amsterdam, I had to record everything myself because to my surprise there was no room recording. And so I was very happy that I brought my 4K full frame Lumix setup and recorded my own audio again directly into the mics because of the noise level in the warehouse and DSM where it is held, which is fantastic for all things except the sound. And Robin Verars is a local leader of the company called Hoisted. He talks about digital sovereignty and he actually put sale to use for the Dutch Ministry of Defense. So digital sovereignty, high sovereignty, implies that you control the clouds you're running in, you control access. And sale is perfect for on-prem, for bringing your own cloud setup, which Robin did. So we proved that we are ready for compartmentalized, air-gapped and sovereign usage in geographies and markets like EU. So another fantastic use case, another fan and Robin helped us also to bring folks into the meetup. If you are in Amsterdam, we're definitely looking for organizers who will keep moving the needle forward. We build it as a Rust AI meetup, but it doesn't have to be Rust, it has to be fast. And I draw the line that the native AI supports. It can be C++, it can be Zig, it can be OCamble. OCamble is fantastic, you should check it out. It cannot be JVM. JVM presents a boundary for Python, which is insurmountable in terms of practicality. And Amdal's law will always kill you in the end. Amdal is stronger than any characters you can bring to the table. So that's the quick summary of that fantastic meetup and the beginning of the Amsterdam Rust user group, as I had to call it on meetup.com and the Rust AI generally. But we basically can call it whatever in the US I call it. Really, I am data meetup, RAID, or Rust AI and data meetup. You know what I mean, right? Bring the fast ecosystem of AI infra 2.0. Bring folks who build foundations in rigorous engineer distributed systems such as SAIL, such as LaserData, such as COCO index, Temporal, and columnar, of course, IDBC, Matt Topol, who spoke at PyData. And then expose it as APIs through Python. But ensure that you do have a solid foundation. The tip of the iceberg is Python, but the base of the iceberg should be really fast. So that's my summary about the first first meetup in Amsterdam. And my next podcast on the structured output bar series of Struck.fm, which is the new name for the podcast I was effectively doing for 15 years. And now all assembled at Struck.fm. Check it out. The next episode will be about PyData Amsterdam itself.