v0.1.0 – Project Setup & Foundations

Released: 2025-04-11

Every great structure begins with a solid foundation. The v0.1.0 release of Masonic Slate was dedicated to laying the architectural groundwork for a robust, scalable, and maintainable platform. This phase wasn't about user-facing features but about making the right technical decisions to ensure the project's long-term success.

A Monorepo for Unified Development

From day one, the project was organized into a Cargo workspace, or "monorepo". This approach houses all our separate-but-related crates in one repository:

api: The high-performance Axum web server that will handle all user requests.

cli: A command-line interface, crucial for early-stage testing and local demonstrations.

common: A shared library that contains the "single source of truth" for our database models, algorithms, and notification logic. This is the heart of the project.

seeder: A utility to populate our database with realistic test data, allowing for rapid development and testing.

This structure prevents code duplication and ensures that when a core piece of logic (like the Event struct) is updated in common, the change is immediately reflected in both the api and cli.

The Technology Stack: Rust, Axum, and Postgres

The core of our backend is built in Rust, a modern language renowned for its performance, reliability, and memory safety. We chose the Axum web framework for its ergonomic design and seamless integration with the Tokio asynchronous runtime, making it capable of handling a high volume of concurrent users.

For our database, we selected PostgreSQL for its rock-solid reliability, scalability, and powerful features. We interface with it using sqlx, a modern, async-safe, and compile-time-checked SQL toolkit for Rust. This choice is critical: sqlxchecks our SQL queries against the actual database schema at compile time, catching errors that would otherwise only be found in production.

This release was capped off by the first API endpoint: a simple /api/health check. This foundational route provides a simple way for monitoring services to confirm that the application is online and responsive.

Click here to view the entire road map for production.