[snake_case]

A few years back I chose Rust as the language I was going to build side projects with. I started out building a wasm A* pathfinding demo [1] to get a better hang of it.

A little bit later I wrote a CLI task runner [2] which is defined by a simple markdown file. I find Rust to be perfectly aligned with the goals of a CLI utility: single deployable binary and very low startup cost.

Most recently I launched a side project [3] (a jigsaw puzzle website) using Rust as my backend API service. I've been slowly building up a server framework over the years and finally was able to put it to use! Yes, it took me much longer to ship something in Rust versus other languages I'm more familiar with. But after learning Rust for a few years now, it doesn't take me much more time to build a feature than it would in another language.

Early on, I ran into a lot of borrower issues and got stuck many times. But after I got over those problems, I realized that for any future hurdles I would face, I just needed to keep pushing and eventually I would find a solution. I have found that with game development or heavily stateful apps, I tend to run into borrower issues more often. But for an API service with a simple input and output, I almost never run into borrower issues.

[1]: https://github.com/jakedeichert/wasm-astar

[2]: https://github.com/jakedeichert/mask

[3]: https://puzzlepanda.com