For your manager
Make the case
Rust Nation UK costs your employer one working day and a ticket. This page sets out what that buys and gives you an email to adapt.
- Conference
- Thursday 18 February 2027
- Out of office
- One day
- Venue
- 1 Basinghall Avenue, London EC2V 5DD
One day out of the office, and for a lot of teams no travel budget at all.
The conference runs on Thursday 18 February at 1 Basinghall Avenue, about five minutes from Moorgate and the same again from Bank. Doors open at 08:00 and the closing address finishes at 17:15, with the social afterwards.
If your team is in London it is a tube fare. From most of the country it is an off-peak return and the same single day. From further out it is a night in a hotel, and the two email templates below account for that difference.
One ticket covers the whole day: every session across all 3 tracks, breakfast, a hot lunch, two breaks, the exhibition hall and the evening social. Nothing else is sold on the day. Prices are on the tickets page, so you can quote a real figure rather than asking for a rough number.
18 talks and 2 keynotes, and four hundred people who write Rust for work.
Sessions run forty-five minutes across 3 tracks. A committee of working Rust engineers reads every submission and picks on what a talk teaches rather than on who is giving it. Nobody buys a slot, and the sponsorship packages that include a talk are held to the same bar as everything else on the schedule. A day of it is a day of training, and it goes deeper than a conference track usually does because everyone in the audience already writes the language.
The people are worth the same as the programme. An engineer who has already shipped the thing your team is halfway through will answer a question over coffee in ten minutes. Nobody writes up the approach they tried for a fortnight and abandoned, so the only way to learn it is from the person who did it.
The exhibition hall puts you in front of maintainers of crates you already depend on. Ten minutes at a stand tends to beat an issue and a fortnight of waiting on a reply. The day finishes with a social at the venue, so the question you think of twenty minutes after a talk has somewhere to go.
Every talk is recorded and published afterwards, which means 3 tracks running at once costs you nothing. Pick the sessions where you want to ask the speaker something, and catch the rest later.
Fill in the brackets before you send it. The 2027 programme is still being chosen, so the specifics that will decide the answer are yours: the problem your team is stuck on, and the skills you want to come back with.
Subject: Rust Nation UK, Thursday 18 February
Hi [name],
I’d like to go to Rust Nation UK on Thursday 18 February. [I’d like to take NAME as well, if there is budget for two.]
It’s the UK’s Rust conference and this is the fifth one. About four hundred people came last year, most of them writing Rust day to day. It runs for a single day at 1 Basinghall Avenue in the City, so I’d be out of the office on the Thursday and there’s nothing to pay for travel or a hotel.
There are two things I’d get out of it, and I’d rate them about equally.
The first is the programme. It’s 18 talks and 2 keynotes across 3 tracks, forty-five minutes each. A committee of working Rust engineers picks them from open submissions, on what a talk teaches rather than who’s giving it. A day of that is a day of training in [the areas we want to get stronger in].
The second is who’s there. I can put [the thing we’re stuck on] to people who have already solved it, catch the maintainers of the crates we depend on at their stands, and find out what other teams tried and gave up on. That last one never gets written down anywhere.
The ticket is [price] plus VAT. It’s refundable up to thirty days before, and if something comes up I can pass it to someone else right up to the day before.
Thanks,
[you]
Subject: Rust Nation UK, 18 February, London
Hi [name],
I’d like to go to Rust Nation UK on Thursday 18 February, at 1 Basinghall Avenue in London. [I’d like to take NAME as well, if there is budget for two.]
Coming from [where we are] it would be [one / two] days out of the office, plus [travel] and [a night’s accommodation] on top of the ticket. That’s more than a local trip, so I’ve set out what we’d get for it.
It’s the UK’s Rust conference and this is the fifth one. About four hundred people came last year, most of them writing Rust day to day. It’s the one day in the year when that many of them are in the same building, and having the same conversations any other way would mean [several] separate calls that mostly would not happen.
There are two things I’d get out of it, and I’d rate them about equally.
The first is the programme. It’s 18 talks and 2 keynotes across 3 tracks, forty-five minutes each. A committee of working Rust engineers picks them from open submissions, on what a talk teaches rather than who’s giving it. A day of that is a day of training in [the areas we want to get stronger in].
The second is who’s there. I can put [the thing we’re stuck on] to people who have already solved it, catch the maintainers of the crates we depend on at their stands, and find out what other teams tried and gave up on. That last one never gets written down anywhere.
There’s also a workshop day on the Wednesday, sold as a separate ticket. If it’s confirmed before we book, I could do both and get two days out of one trip.
The ticket is [price] plus VAT. It’s refundable up to thirty days before, and if something comes up I can pass it to someone else right up to the day before.
Thanks,
[you]
There are three other ways in, and none of them need a training budget.
Submit a talk. Speakers get a conference ticket, and we may be able to help with travel and accommodation on top. The call for papers is open to first time speakers, and we help either way.
Ask your employer to sponsor. A stand costs more than a ticket and usually comes out of a different budget, and it brings passes with it. The packages and prices are published in full rather than sent on request.
Buy the ticket now and sort it out later. Prices go up as the date gets closer. Refunds run to thirty days before, and a ticket can be transferred to a colleague up to the day before, so an early ticket is rarely wasted even if your plans change.
Ready to ask
If the answer comes back yes, tickets are on sale now. If it comes back “maybe next quarter”, the mailing list will tell you when the programme goes up, which is usually the thing that changes the answer.