Team Best Practices

Twenty practices that keep Rust teams fast, aligned, and kind to future hires.

1. Time-to-first-PR under five days: Measure onboarding; fix tooling blockers immediately.

2. Buddy system week one: Daily 15-minute check-in, not passive Slack channel.

3. Single toolchain pin: rust-toolchain.toml matches CI MSRV 1.97.0.

4. Onboarding doc in repo: docs/onboarding.md is canonical, not wiki-only.

5. Toolchain checklist completed day 1: Before assigning feature work.

6. Codebase orientation diagram: Every hire draws request flow; buddy validates.

7. Conventions doc linked in PR template: Reduces repeated style comments.

8. Review checklist for soundness: unsafe, unwrap, blocking async, SQL injection.

9. CI mirrors local hooks: fmt, clippy -D warnings, test, --locked build.

10. Small first merged PR: Proves pipeline works for this human.

11. Log onboarding gaps as doc PRs: Same-week fixes for next hire.

12. ADR for Rust platform choices: Tokio, sqlx, error strategy, workspace layout.

13. rust-rules or team rules crate/docs: Codify repeated review comments.

14. Quarterly dependency hygiene sprint: cargo update, advisories, deny policy.

15. Incident learnings update cookbooks: Link postmortem to troubleshooting pages.

16. Agent skills documented: When to invoke Axum, async, unsafe review skills.

17. No heroics on call: Runbooks in repo; shadow before solo rotation.

18. Explicit MSRV bump process: RFC or ticket with CI and consumer impact.

19. Celebrate refactors that delete code: Negative LOC is a team win.

20. Retro onboarding after every hire: Update checklists within one week.

FAQs

Related

• Onboarding Devs Checklist
• Code review guidelines
• Conventions & style guide
• Git best practices

Stack versions: This page was written for Rust 1.97.0 (edition 2024), Tokio 1.x, Axum 0.8, serde 1.0, sqlx 0.8, clap 4, and Polars 0.46+.