Rust is a language that boasts the best of many worlds: ergonomic, expressive, performant and safe. The promise of Rust is being able to write complex code, at any layer of the stack, and be confident that it behaves as intended. This talk walks through these characteristics of the language and how they come together to enable a programming experience that is filled with confidence in the code we write. Of course, no talk would be honest without talking about some of the challenges involved; we'll cover these along the way. Throughout, I'll touch on practical examples from experience building a globally distributed proxy using familiar crates in the Rust ecosystem such as Hyper and Tokio. If you're skeptical about how good the Rust developer experience can be, this talk is for you.