Podcast
Matic - Eric Seppanen, Software Engineer
The idea of smart robots automating away boring household chores sounds enticing, yet these devices rarely work as advertised: they get stuck, they break down, or are security nightmares. And so it’s refreshing to see a company like Matic taking a different approach by attempting to build truly smart, reliable, and privacy-respecting robots. They use Rust for 95% of their codebase, and use camera vision to navigate, vacuum, and mop floors.
I sit down with Eric Seppanen, Software Engineer at Matic, to learn about vertical integration in robotics, on-device sensor processing, large Rust codebases, and why Rust is a great language for the problem space.
Show Notes
About Matic
Matic is on a mission to solve everyday problems with robotics. Design Milk wrote in an article about Matic: “Matic Robot Vacuum Collects Dust but Not Your Personal Data” and I really love that quote. It’s a great summary of what Matic is about: privacy-respecting, truly smart robots. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised a $24M Series A round.
About Eric Seppanen
Eric is a systems engineer with a passion for reliable, well-designed software. He has a background in kernel development and high-performance computing with C++ and now works on robotics with Rust.
With his calm and insightful demeanor, Eric is the ideal person to talk about Rust’s strengths for people with a C++ background.
Links From The Episode (In Chronological Order)
- Why Rust? It’s the Safe Choice
- Folkert’s episode
- egui
- SLAM
- Tokio Async Runtime
- reqwest
- Axum web framework
- The Cargo Book: “features should be additive”
- Jon Gjengset’s YouTube channel
- Jon’s book “Rust for Rusteaceans”
- Mara Bos’ book “Rust Atomics and Locks”
- Will Wilson from antithesis about FoundationDB: “Is something bugging you?”
Official Links
About corrode
"Rust in Production" is a podcast by corrode, a company that helps teams adopt Rust. We offer training, consulting, and development services to help you succeed with Rust. If you want to learn more about how we can help you, please get in touch.