Not everyone enters software through the same door. For Gabriella Burns, now an engineer at Moody’s, the path started in public health and led, unexpectedly, to full-stack development with Rust – writing Rust code and building modern web apps from front to back.
FROM PUBLIC HEALTH TO PYTHON
Gabriella studied public health and environmental studies and worked at the NYC Department of Health during COVID. Her interest in data led her to a role at Moody’s, where she spent her time sorting through spreadsheets and CSVs.
Eventually, she wanted a better way to manage the workload and started teaching herself Python. That decision changed everything. She ended up automating parts of her job and ended up landing her a spot in Moody’s engineering team.
WRITING APIS, LEARNING RUST
Her first exposure to Rust came through real projects. Moody’s was already using Rust in production, and she began contributing by writing new API endpoints. At that point, she’d already picked up Flask and found API development interesting, Rust just pushed things further in terms of performance and reliability.
Over time, she became more comfortable with Rust’s tooling and now works with it daily, building full-stack apps using Leptos and WebAssembly (Wasm).
GETTING INTO FRONT-END RUST
Rust is still mostly known for its back-end and systems-level use cases, but Gabriella’s been exploring how it works on the front end too.
“The fact that Amazon is using Rust for frontend on some devices really surprised me – I didn’t expect that a couple years ago.”
At Rust Nation 2025, she gave a talk on building full-stack web applications using Rust, Wasm, and Leptos. The talk built on earlier workshops she ran with the Women in Rust group.
ON BEING SELF-TAUGHT
Gabriella didn’t come from a computer science background, and that’s something she talks about openly. Her advice for others learning Rust or switching into tech from another field?
“It’s okay not to know everything. You’ll learn by doing, even if it feels slow at first. Look back at your old code — you’ll see how far you’ve come.”
She’s now part of a team at Moody’s working on supply chain and geopolitical risk, combining data analytics with software to surface key insights, a solid example of how non-traditional backgrounds can bring a lot to technical work.
