Rust Saiargaliev

Senior engineer focused on operational reliability, performance, and developer tooling.

I am

  • currently lead engineer at voiio, helping scale and maintain a platform spanning wellbeing content, AI workflows, and video infrastructure.

What I focus on

  • improving mature Django systems without rewriting them from scratch.
  • making production systems easier to debug, observe, and safely evolve.
  • reducing operational friction through better tooling, testing, CI, and deployment practices.
  • shipping pragmatic solutions quickly while keeping long-term maintainability in mind.

Selected projects and open-source work

  • Model Bakery — the go-to Django fixture library with 1.4M+ monthly downloads.
  • YearYear — a small app for yearly reflection and planning.
  • pypigraph.org — a visualization tool for exploring Python package dependencies.
  • django-devbar — a browser devtool for measuring SQL queries.

Occasionally, I write

Previously, I used to

  • work at thermondo, SMENA, and in other places.
  • create and moderate engineering communities, host meetups, and give lightning talks.
  • abandon a lot of side projects.

Find me on