02 May 2020 · #blogging
While learning Rust I was struggling with certain concepts so I tried to organize my thoughts by writing them down in markdown files and I soon had several markdown files. I thought "Maybe I should start a blog?" but then I realized "I probably shouldn't, my posts will never be as good as anything written on Rust by Niko Matsakis, Saoirse Shipwreckt, Huon Wilson, David Tolnay, Alexis Beingessner, Daniel Keep, Carl Fredrik Samson, Aleksey Kladov, Amos Wegner, Pascal Hertleif, Dimitri Sabadie, Daniel Henry-Mantilla, Steve Klabnik, Jake Goulding, or Carol Nichols". That list isn't even exhaustive, there's easily dozens of people I left out! There's lots of super smart people who are already writing about Rust. However, I have one unique advantage that none of those people have: I'm dumb. Super smart people tend to write super smart articles that only other super smart people understand. There's a gap in the market for us dummies, and it's that gap I intend to fill with my writing.
Also I saw this comic which was pretty encouraging:
Artist credit: stuffman
I'm a full-stack webdev by trade so I'm super nitpicky when it comes to websites. I get lost in the technical details of trying to build the perfect website that I spend zero time actually writing any content. I know there are hundreds of static site generators that do 90%+ of the technical work for you but I've tried those in the past and wasn't satisfied with them. That's not because they're bad tools, a lot of them are excellent tools, it's just that I'm a craftsman and not happy with something unless I made it with my own two hands. It's a problem, I know.
I was almost about to give up on my blog idea but that's when I ran across Frank McSherry's blog. Wow, how come I've never thought of doing that? You don't have to build, deploy, or render anything! You push the markdown files to github and people can just read them on github. It's so simple. I love it. I decided to take this approach for my own blog so that I could focus all of my productive energy into actually writing good content.
One small final note: I plan to focus this blog entirely around Rust. Aside from this initial post I don't intend to use this blog to post about personal things.
- Common Rust Lifetime Misconceptions
- Tour of Rust's Standard Library Traits
- Beginner's Guide to Concurrent Programming: Coding a Multithreaded Chat Server using Tokio
- Learning Rust in 2024
- Using Rust in Non-Rust Servers to Improve Performance
- Sizedness in Rust
- RESTful API in Sync & Async Rust
- Learn Assembly with Entirely Too Many Brainfuck Compilers