Jan Pochyla joins Rayon, as Senior Rust Engineer

We are glad to announce that Jan Pochyla is joining Rayon. Jan previously worked at SatoshiLabs, and lives today in Prague. We sat down with him, to get his take on joining the company…

Of all places, why join Rayon?

J.P.: I think the tools for creators, and software in general, could be so much better than what we have to put up with today. The classical, desktop floppy-disk-icon software is often performant, but feels stuck, barely advancing anymore. The Web has been slow, and inappropriate for professional creative work. I joined Rayon because I think that with the right technology, we can change this, and make something really valuable together.

You are starting at Rayon as a Senior Rust Engineer. Can you tell us more as to why Rust interest you?

J.P.: Rust is the one of the rare programming languages that figured out how to beat the usual trade-offs in the field: performance vs. safety, reliability vs. convenience, focus vs. versatility, and so on. I’ve always liked to stay closer to the metal in my work, and making stuff that is performant and secure, so I enjoy working with Rust immensely.

Beside work, what do you usually do in your free time?

J.P.: I’ve started a desktop Spotify client, Psst, during the sudden free time surplus of the first pandemic wave. It gained quite a few GitHub stars after getting posted on Hacker News (much less pull-requests though), and brought me closer to the Rust GUI community. I’m really grateful for that. I try to hack on it when I have the chance, which is not very often since my baby daughter was born. So yeah — spending time with my family, travels, music. The usual :)

What’s the best thing you’ve ever built?

J.P.: For six or seven years, I’ve worked on Trezor, a security platform and hardware wallet. We used a high-level language for the firmware, and built many components in-house: message codecs, GUI library, async event loop. I’m very proud of how that turned out!