Learning Rust

I've written before about the advantages of being a polyglot programmer, but it's been a bit since I've really been excited about learning a new language.

Picking up Node.js after Ruby made a lot of sense early in my career, and has served me well, but ultimately was a bit of a let down. I don't feel like it delivered on it's promise or what it could have been.

Elixir was a natural next pick. It's a great language that has a lot of the same community values as Ruby, while providing a superior development and maintenance experience.

I've dabbled in other languages like Haskell and TypeScript, but Haskell hasn't seemed compelling enough a win comparatively, despite a steep learning curve filled with interesting potential insights. TypeScript, continuing the legacy of Node.js, has failed to deliver on the idea of truly isomorphic applications. This has continued to make it far less compelling to really dive into for me.

That said, Rust has been interesting to me for a long time. The strong emphasis on performance, backwards compatiblity, and a compiler/type system that aims to help you develop faster and more confidently, in a maintainable way seems like a massive win.

The performance metrics Actix has put forward while being able to use Rust rather than C++ or Go are very compelling to me. Add to that the fact that both Microsoft and Amazon now appear to be betting big on Rust and it seems like there is no time like the present to pick another compiled language to learn.

With that in mind I figured that documenting my experience learning Rust could be a good way to help folks in the community identify resources they could use to continue learning as well, and where potential gaps are, at least from the perspective of a more experience software engineer.

So far my journey is starting with the Rust Book:

and

Both of which I'll be documenting with the #learning-rust tag, and it's own page. Hopefully these updates will be coming weekly, but realistically I'll plan on more like once a month updates on this front. If you'd like to join me on this journey send me a DM on Twitter. I'd love to have you aboard.