Rust Programming Language RustFest Global 2021/2022, 28 Mar 2022

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From YouTube: Luis Argumedo: Learning Rust by accident — RustFest LATAM 2022

Description

Discover how you can delve into Rust by sparkling your curiosity or through fun ideas like creating a Sudoku with GTK, or playing around with creative code without (as much) pain in the process

https://rustfest.global/session/60-aprender-rust-por-accidente/
Español: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ktj9RazvIA

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Hello, we're here in our last presentation.

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All of the presentations have been very interesting from the history of code now video games. I think we have seen different parts of rust and where it can be applied, and this last talk.

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Would not be one of those because luis is here with us, he's going to talk a little bit about his learning experience and his introduction to the world of rust, because his profile is web developer with javascript and frameworks and weird frameworks, and now he is playing a little bit with rust.

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So now, who's luis.

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Luis is a software developer in a company called wos and he can spend hours perfecting a css animation. He has a lot of patience for that and when he's not sitting in the computer, he is flying in a static trapeze.

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So now, let's hope that that trapeze is very nice for you, because that is the rust world and the floor is yours: hi, yuli, hello,.

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Well, I am going to talk to you about how my journey has been and how I felt that I learned rust by accident.

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So julie has said something about me. I am normally called wicho and you can find me in twitter, but I am more a gossip consumer instead of content creator and I have a little kitty and I am the kind of person who weighs and grinds his coffee every day just for context.

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So everything started with this question that was have you heard of rust, and I answered like what rust yeah rust. It's a very fast language, compiles as fast as c and I said wow and it was very fair, very safe, very memory safe.

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But what really stood out to me was the web assembly because I come from web development and I thought that that sounded very nice. I was very excited to learn rust.

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So I started looking where to find where to learn rust because it is a new language. So I found.

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That I found with what I believe that everyone here knows at the time of learning, and that is the book.

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And yeah it wasn't the exception. I started reading the book.

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So I installed rost, I printed a hello world. I started reading about the borrow checker and how it manages memory and studying, equipping and all of these which are very specific of this language.

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But in truth I was being very bored.

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I really lost all my motivation. I just said goodbye rust.

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It was very interesting to learn, but I didn't have really a reason to learn, particularly because it was just about reading and reading, and I wasn't really working on the project in rust. So I said well, that's it. I will continue to just work on the best language in the world. Javascript. No sorry, I'm joking- and this reminded me a little bit of school because there I had to learn biology and.

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Chemistry and all of those things.

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Looks like there is a problem with these lights.

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Okay, but this was all.

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Something that I would study for an evaluation.

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But in the end I really didn't want to do that, and I just self-imposed that on me like, I would learn rust and it didn't work for me.

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Until I found this thing called rustlings.

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And I thought it was very nice because it has all the exercises and I could learn better.

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And this just motivated me again because also another friend was learning rust and I just said well, let's learn together, of course,.

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And I thought it was very easy because I did it in my free time because, just as I could sit here and watch tick tocks, I was going also to do the rostlings exercises.

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So I said why do I I not do something like my own exercises.

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My own challenges.

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I think I've broken the slides, so I remembered a project from the university from university.

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Which was tic-tac-toe.

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So it was something that we did in intro to programming.

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And I said well I'm going to do it in rust to see what happens.

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Okay, I think you can see the slides better, so all of this was useful to learn some rust concepts which the basic you know, variables: conditions cycles, arrays data types.

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And here we have an image of what my tic-tac-toe version was.

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It was not validating if I was going out of boundaries, but it was very useful to me because I learned a lot- and this took me to this feeling, because it's when you are understanding something and you say wow- that's exciting. I want more of this.

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So from here onwards I said I am going to do something more complicated.

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I am going to build asudoku.

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More topics recursion algorithms, somewhat obvious, without caring much for language, but I had to just deal with more rust concepts which are different to what I'm used to with javascript, such as structs modules, crates.

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Because I always thought that gtk and all of these things from linux were just for the big boys.

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Perhaps you want to just ride the roller coaster when you're just six years old- and I was scared- perhaps I was feeling that I wasn't meant for that, but because I was just doing it for fun.

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I didn't even think about that. I just said it doesn't matter. I have to do this.

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And while I was developing the sudoku, I just had that feeling again and I wanted more and more. I want more rust because I am just grasping it.

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So I'm going to show a bit because it makes me really happy to share and what else did I do well, I started doing the other code.

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And there I learned more things, but something that I found really important about this.

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Was that I felt that I was becoming fluent in the language.

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I wouldn't have made it without rust, analyzer and these tools that allowed me to make my id very tuned for all of this to take me by the hand- and I am really thankful for that.

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So I learned to open files close them to learn unit testing, because.

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There was a time when I was: it was very tedious how to learn whether my code was working or not. So how do I do unit testing in rust and then with macros? I found macros that opened files and it's really good.

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Because without the need of compiling, if I had a typo in the file name in my editor, it looked like it was wrong. So I was amazed. I thought it was blackmagic, so that is very pleasant. I was very happy.

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So I'm going to show you a little bit of my sudoku overall, it's not the greatest thing, but I am very excited because I have theory that there wasn't a sudoku game in gtk and I was under the impression that oh I'm going to publish a package in this repository in the genome.

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Well, I didn't think that, but I think that was what was most useful to me is that I was very familiar with something that I already knew.

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Which was css so my drive to do. This is sudoku that I saw in android that colored the numbers that were already selected. So I said I want to do the same thing, so I have to do the same thing and since I was using rust, I said well, I'm going to build it in rust.

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I am not going to use javascript, I'm not going to use anything from the web.

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So I am going to solve it and instead of you having a talk, you are going just to find someone doing a sudoku live.

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So here's a nine, for example,.

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So going back to the talk.

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After having finished this project,.

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I didn't want more coffee. I just wanted more rust, so I just started using nano to make generative art. I made a couple of things the repositories going around and I learned many things in the way, particularly that they weren't about rust. I mean I did learn the language, but I learned more things, but at this point something really interesting happened.

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And that it was that I already know rust, but I wasn't. I wasn't warned about this.

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Because suddenly for me it clicked, I am changing things.

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And a small percentage of what I am doing, I haven't had to look at the documentation.

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So having the id configured and set up, it helps a lot, but I already could type it without checking anything, because I already knew from the bigger picture the basics of what was going on.

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So that was very exciting. I was very motivated. I thought I could learn anything I wanted and that I was going to be a pro.

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And, among the other things I learned.

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It was that rust is my friend.

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Different from other compilers, I don't think I had seen anything this pretty other than in the elm language. That somewhat tells you what to do. This is an error that I made intentionally and something really simple.

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So when you're just setting the size of the window to decay brushed, but it not only tells me that there is a mistake, an error, and it tells me maybe you want to do this.

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And that is missed when I have to do javascript again really.

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Because it's not going to tell me it's not going to suggest to me the answer to my error. It's just going to leave me there just hanging around.

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So this is something that I really loved.

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Something else was that the raft community are also my friends.

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Because I'm a person who looks all over the documentation because, on the one hand it is about the challenge of solving a problem by yourself and the other part is just that. Maybe it's there.

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And I don't like it when people just point out some part of the documentation that I didn't read, because I think that that can be upsetting. But I didn't find it anywhere.

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I wanted to have an event handler in the keyboard for my sudoku, so when I wrote the numbers or if I wrote any other character well, it would be normal, so I wrote I found the matrix, the gtk matrix and rust, so so I asked and in less than 10 minutes I already had solved the problem that I have had for three days and I had been looking all around so I ended up in the gtk documentation from c so yeah. It was useful to me.

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I understand my tool better, but I still can't find the answer to my problem and the rust community solve it.

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So when I was making this talk, what happens here is that you learn by doing so, I started finding out about what is learning. By doing so, I found this person with creative commons license and he talks a lot about what is learning by doing.

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And precisely I learned rust by accident because my approach was never.

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The second time I tried- I wasn't even I it didn't even matter to me whether it was rust. My intention was, I want to build a sudoku. I want to use jdk. I want to build a desktop ui. I want to do backtracking.

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So after three months.

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Well, I just knew a rust. It was something that happened. An incident.

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I even found the paper to my surprise, about education, legal education.

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And how they proposed.

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Doing instead of just learning the theory just going out to the real world and just entering trials to create some learning experience, that is incidental, and that is true, because when you learn to ride a bike, well, you don't read the documentation of the bike.

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I think that the only thing you can do is just to ride on the bike or get behind the wheel and learn to do it. There is no other way.

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So from all my journey.

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I take something very important from here, and that is that I was doing it for fun.

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And differently, from the first time it was not about looking for work. It was not about.

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Just learning or something like that, I just said I'm going to have fun. This is all very nice.

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There are no bad ideas when you are learning something. I think that any project is good.

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Because, at least I could judge something before I did it before, wanting it to learn and ask myself well. Why would I want to do this? This is bad idea.

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But in a learning environment I think that anything works as long as we have fun.

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So, overall, this was an invitation, so if you come from other programming languages or if you have never programmed- or you are just learning to program just program and rust- and you will see that it is very easy going this experience, it is not really that easy to learn.

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Many times I just wanted to throw away my keyboard and break my display.

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But do not be afraid the only way you're going to understand rust, better is programming in rust,.

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So that is all I wanted to say. I don't know if you have any questions.

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The audio is not coming through.

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I'm sorry I was unmute typical from all the pandemic, so thank you so much for sharing your experience.

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I had one question regarding your journey that you had what was for you your learning curve, your greatest learning curve coming from javascript html css, to move to the background to start learning, rust.

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I think it was memory management.

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It reminded me a lot to the university, because in c you could manage your memory with pointers, because, but I didn't do that a lot just to pass the exams, but it was different then, because borrow checker I feel like you can do things, but I'm going to give you very specific defaults to prevent you from doing dangerous things and getting used to those rules were so.

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I was thinking. Why are you so strict? I want to do what I want to do. So let me do it.

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I think we have time for one more question.

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And in this regard, for example, building your sudoku, what do you think was your biggest challenge to program your sudoku.

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Besides memory management.

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It was between making the borrow checker happy on the one hand and, on the other hand,.

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I was trying to solve sudokus and there were some details that I did not know, for example, for a valid solution to be valid. It didn't need to have another solution, so I had to implement that rule and, let's fight the borrow checker for a while.

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So the rules regarding the compiler, because on the on the side of gtk, the bridge that there is between the c implementation and to be able to use it in rust, there is a part where you need to use the cell that it allows you to have a pointer so something it worked. Something like I was familiar with, but you have to do it the rust way, safer.

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Well, yeah, it's just an entire experience to make that switch because yeah I am more front-end. So now let's go to the big boy things you know, and I think we are already done. Thank you so much luis for being here with us to share your experience.

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And to finish, what could you tell the people who, like you, are changing their experience from one language to the other or if you want to encourage them and invite them so that just like you, because you look like you, look a little bit nervous so come inviting them to come and talk about their experience in these types of events,.

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Well, I think that, just as I said, the only way to learn to present is also doing so. I thought well, I also have to go there and learn to make better presentations, so don't be afraid of rust, compiling a language.

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It's not something to be scared of.