An interview with Greg Johnston. He's a priest in the Episcopal church and the creator of the popular Leptos framework. Leptos is a full stack web framework for Rust, somewhat like Next.js from the JavaScript ecosystem. We talk about how he got into ministry, whether he ever considered software development as a career, AI assisted coding, and the future of Rust and Leptos.

Sponsor Greg's open source work here: https://github.com/sponsors/gbj
Leptos: https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

Keyboard: Glove80 - https://bit.ly/3EKyn7X
Camera 1: Canon EOS R8 https://amzn.to/4gSpivt
Camera 2: Canon EOS R5 https://amzn.to/3CCrxzl
Monitor: Dell U4914DW 49in https://amzn.to/3MJV1jx
Microphone: Sennheiser 416 https://amzn.to/3Fkti60
Microphone Interface: Focusrite Clarett+ 2Pre https://amzn.to/3J5dy7S
Tripod: JOBY GorillaPod 5K https://amzn.to/3JaPxMA
Mouse: Razer DeathAdder Elite https://amzn.to/4tu57ul
Computer: Mac Studio M4 Max https://amzn.to/44RWIWK
Lens: Canon RF35mm F1.8 https://amzn.to/49XHWkT
Caffeine: High Brew Cold Brew Coffee https://amzn.to/3hXyx0q
More Caffeine: Monster Energy Juice, Pipeline Punch https://amzn.to/3Czmfox

Code to the Moon

Greg Johnston, an Episcopal priest and Harvard/Yale graduate, created Leptos—a Rust web framework with 19,000+ GitHub stars. He discusses his unconventional path from CIA rejection to ministry to open source, his self-taught programming journey starting at age 10, and why he built Leptos after being dissatisfied with existing Rust web frameworks. The conversation covers WebAssembly's current limitations (particularly the unfulfilled promise of direct DOM access), architectural performance differences versus language-level overhead, the view macro's design philosophy, AI tooling experiences, and comparisons with Dioxus. Johnston also reveals he's building a programming language to explore reactive inference and async improvements, though it may remain private to avoid maintenance burden.

The S-Tier Rust Web Framework and the Priest Who Created It