Just a quick rundown of things happening here recently.

Getting Started

We got started! And definitely have some interest here already!

See, if you missed them:

First Reading Club

We had our first “Reading Club Meeting”! This was for reading through “The Book”.

See, if you missed it:

Note also that there’s a section in the sidebar for “Running Projects”, basically any “series” of regular posts/cadences for a specific shared project. There’s plenty of scope for more here … let me know your thoughts!

I think us new to the language pretty quickly started wrestling with the ideas around the borrow checker (who would have thought!), which is also the part of the “official reading” for the next reading club!

This reading club has a twitch stream running in parallel (see https://www.twitch.tv/deerfromsmoke), on Tuesday’s, 6.30pm EST (New York Time). If you can’t make it then, videos will be on youtube and discussions will happen here of course.

Personally, I think the value of “study groups” or “workshops” or “reading clubs” is often forgotten. I was quickly reminded of that when just being in the twitch stream or reading a comment on the post got me compiling rust code. This community and the reading club has already helped me learn rust better/quicker!

Fediverse Friends

Turns out there’s a nice video series on Rust over on PeerTube (fediverse youtube), which nicely parallels our rust reading club.

Even more nicely, PeerTube and lemmy federate with each other, which means you can subscribe to the channel through your lemmy instance and comment directly on the videos from lemmy! The channel should be available at !andybalaam_lectures@diode.zone (this may require nudging your instance to get it to fetch the details, and, if none of the rust videos show up, may need to be searched specifically to force your instance to back fill).

See the channel on PeerTube here: https://diode.zone/w/p/xesbWmNanEHNBfJCZFQRUm (and the first post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/11655570).

The author, Andy, is also a subscriber here and is likely interested in any comments you have.

They posted here on how fediverse interop does work: https://mastodon.social/users/andybalaam/statuses/111906773513868731 (it’s from mastodon but to this lemmy community and about their peertube account)

Recommended Rust Reading

For more experienced or confident rust programmers, having reading clubs for code bases or bigger/harder projects is probably a good idea.

We haven’t got anything like that up and running, but we probably could and should.

To that end:

  • the rust crate/package for managing ActivityPub federation, employed by lemmy, was suggested (see GitHub Repo and post here)
  • The new lemmy API client re-written in rust (for the upcoming leptos front-end): see post here

Let me know if you’re interested in having a regular reading group for such things!

Rust Practice Projects

Something that’s been spoken about is starting to work together on projects or puzzles to practice our rust as we learn.

Advent of code with rust is one idea that may become a regular “series” here.

I’m sure there are others that you’re interested in.

Personally, I’m thinking of just diving in and trying to make a basic “ToDo” web app with rust using Actix-web (web framework) and diesel (sql ORM in rust), both of which are used by lemmy, and some http template renderer. I’d probably stall pretty quickly but it’s also such a common thing that fumbling around on it might be quite productive.

Anyone else interested in something like that as a regular/weekly series of posts for facilitating loosely collective work?