Shaffan's Blog

Tag: tutorial

  • Zero to Web in Rust – Rustlings is The Coolest Tutorial Ever!

    Hello, friends! I hope you’re all doing super well!

    After hearing friends and many people on the Internet talk about Rust for quite a long time, I decided I would take the plunge and start learning it! I had made some short-lived attempts to learn the language before, but I didn’t stick with it. This time is different, however, for a few reasons.

    For one, I’ve decided that i will document my journey in Rust on this blog. As you may have guessed, my goal is to build a web application in Rust; I will probably recreate Google Keep or something similar, as I find it to be a useful app. Unfortunately, it also runs the risk of being sunsetted by Google at any moment. It’s just something that Google has done with a lot of its products over the years. I’m not entirely sure why.

    Anyway, I wanted to tell you all that Rustlings is an awesome way to pick up Rust by actually writing bits of code! The approach has been a lot better than I thought it would be, since each unit test takes just a one or two small changes to pass, so you get to write just enough code to train your fingers on how Rust code feels to write. You don’t have to worry about getting bogged down in picking out libraries or frameworks for a project, you write just enough code to get familiar with a concept, with instant feedback from the delightful Rust compiler and Rustlings test suite!

    Aside from being interactive and providing a rapid feedback loop, Rustlings is made to correspond to the freely available Rust Book, also a great first-party resource from the Rust team! 😀

    This first image displays a very friendly error message from Rust. I used the wrong syntax to get the element at index 1 of a tuple, so it told me exactly how to solve the error. Languages such as Python and even C++ are also adopting these sorts of helpful error messages. I can say it’s a very welcome improvement over having to Google basic bits of syntax when learning a new language, or returning to an old one after a long time.

    This second image shows that each exercise automatically turns green in the side bar when a file is saved. It’s much friendlier than manually rerunning tests. Simply rerunning tests on save is a smart idea that I wish I had thought of, but it’s something that comes with the Rustlings exercises. Speaking of which, here’s the GitHub repository for those exercises.

    Give Rustlings a go! You won’t regret it!

    Thanks for making it to the end of this article. Be sure to subscribe, and stay turned for my next posts, since I’m still going to be doing the Rustlings exercises for a few more days. I plan to post about creating a Rusty REST API, with a blazing-fast™ UI library. I’d love to hear your thoughts about which libraries or frameworks would be best for these tasks! 🙂

  • I Don’t Want to Be Just a Software Developer Anymore

    “You’ll burn out within five years in software development.”

    I think about this quote from my dad a lot. It’s something he said to me when we were discussing corporate careers a few years ago, and it turns out that this prophecy is slowly coming true.

    Just not in a way either of us really expected.

    For my part, I expected that my dad’s premise would be false. I was wrong. Sort of. I still want to do software development, I just don’t want to do it in a corporate office, day in and day out, following Scrum practices, trying to react gracefully to condescending “feedback” from toxic managers, and dealing with the constant threat of getting laid off. I even faced religious discrimination from one of my managers at Chase Bank. Despite the fact that said manager knew I couldn’t drive due to vision issues, he would still repeatedly corner me and ask me why I was coming back late from Friday prayer (I had to wait for an Uber or Lyft to arrive and take me back to work after the prayer was over.)

    I also want to take a more creative approach to the craft of software development. I don’t want to just bang out code and corresponding unit tests, and documentation to tie it all together; I want to transcend simply writing software by creating videos and prose around software development, and the competing interests that surround it. There are a lot of possiblities here: I could make tutorials in text or in video, create online courses for in-demand technologies, or talk about the state of the job market. I might try to do all of those things, to some extent. Most of all, one of my goals is simply to connect with other developers and professionals, so that we can all talk about our experiences and learn from one another, going forward into new successes without repeating mistakes from the past.

    We can also simply commiserate and support each other emotionally during hard times, like the present.

    This is all something I’m still learning how to do, obviously, but it’s great to already be seeing pretty cool results. I got five thousand views on a blog post in two days, despite still being new to WordPress. This also resulted in a great discussion taking place on a thread in the programming subreddit.

    Thanks for reading this brief post! If you like what you read and want to do something similar together, consider subscribing to this blog. There should be a big button at the top to do so, if you please!

    Also, if you’ve experienced anything similar in your career, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!