Starting "Rust for Rustaceans"

Recently, with all the AI psychosis, I realized that I miss programming. I miss learning hard things, figuring out the solution, structuring code.

A few years ago I got into Rust and wrote a couple of short, easy programs. My favorite part is how I could leverage WebAssembly to write ultra-perfomant web apps.

In one of my previous roles, they were enforcing AI aggresively, without any reasoning or criteria: unlimited Claude Code tokens, AI-generated Jira tickets, no human code reviews. It was kind of a mess, but understandable when code quality really does not matter.

These days, I got some more free time so I decided to resume my Rust journey.

Today I started reading Rust for Rustaceans, the Jon Gjenset book. I’m a big fan of Jon’s streams. I remember watching them in the past and not understanding shit, hoping that through pure osmosis, some knowledge seeped into me.

In the past I also gave a fair shot into reading his book, but it was too advanced for me. So I did it the right way: The Rust Book, rustlings, wrote some small CLI programs on my own, a WebAssembly program… This gave me a better overview.

Finally I can say that today I made it through the first chapter without issues. I still feel it’s kind of advanced, but in a good way. I love to understand what I do, how it works underneath. I’m a firm believer in craft and care, and code quality.

This first chapter focuses on different types of memory: stack, heap, static. It also presents the borrow checker & ownership. I would say this is the number one concept that you need to succeed in Rust programming. Understanding this also helped me a ton in my JavaScript programming. Reasoning about what I’m doing exactly and if I’m copying/referencing. Rust programming feels more real compared to JavaScript, and it’s one of the aspects I enjoy more.

By reasoning about what we are doing with memory & variables we can produce a better, more optimized program. And this is just high-level, just the beginning.