[iudqnolq]

I wouldn't treat it as a binary. Use the project to provide feedback on what learning material to read, then go back to the project until you hit another blocker.

Suppose you're read a book about Rust and now you want to write a web service. You take a peek on Reddit and hear good things about Axum, so you check out its docs.

You write some handlers that do crud operations on a database, and it's all going well. You can translate the examples in the docs into your code in a pretty straightforward way.

Then you decide you want live chat. You've heard of websockets, and axum has a websocket example. But you keep beating your head against the compiler. What is the right type for a chat room? Who owns the chat rooms?

You realize now would be a good moment to take a step back and learn more systemically. After reading through the tokio mini redis tutorial async makes a lot more sense and you're back on track.

In this example you "wasted" a little time before you took a step back and studied async more, but you saved significant time by tailoring your learning to what you needed. If you hadn't gotten partway into your project you might not have realized you'd want to learn async next and instead studied something else.