My Rusty Journey Into Webapps!

When I was little I always had one dream, I always wanted to create my own video games. I have always been a very passionate gamer, even today I play every single week.

Video games were the reason why I studied software engineering, I remember how excited I was to even print a hello world on the screen!

Hello world!

Unfortunately, as time passed and more life responsibilities happened I started to move away from simply coding into more of the management side of things. And even though I have never been disconnected from reading code and having great technical conversations with the people I have had the privilege to work with I have become very rusty in my coding skills.

I really enjoy the people management side, don't get me wrong, I don't want a career change but there is a gap that I feel empty and I need to fill.

I need to work on my dream, I need to create some games and apps (even if it is just as a hobby).

Back in December 2021 when I came to the realization that I was straying away from that passion I decided to take action. If you are reading this, don't make the mistake that I have done, don't postpone pursuing passions just because you think that in the future you will have time to do so... Time is not a given, time is today! so always do the things that make you happy.

So with that new philosophy in my life now, I have decided to start to code again. And just like anyone who goes into coding I was faced with the most important question to answer... and that is, what language should I use? And after playing with python, Go, C++, C, javascript/typescript, and Rust I ended up choosing *drum roll please*

RUST!!!!!

Probably you are thinking, why Rust? If you are doing games why not use a game engine like Unity or UE (C# or C++), and if my focus is web apps why not javascript? And those are valid questions, but the reality is, that I wanted to challenge myself and Rust was the answer... Why?

1) An amazing and growing dev community (Rust was named the best language for like the 5th year in a row in stack overflow!)

2) A friendly compiler (knowing that I will not mess stuff with pointers or memory leaks is a big deal!

3) WASM and Blockchain support

In fact, there are also game engines in Rust already so I might give those a shot (I am looking at you Bevy). But the other main reason is that I want to dive into blockchain development and Solana supports Rust as well.

With all of that in mind, it was easy for me to choose Rust, I can write end-to-end standalone apps, full-stack web applications, or dive into blockchain development with one language!

We will see how far I can go, I hope you come on this journey with me!