Fun with Rust

1

Wasmer

While waiting for placement at Andela, I started something. I wanted to create a community of developers who had already worked on WebAssembly projects in the past. A bit of a back story is in order now. During my exploratory phase before I settled for web development, Web Assembly was announced. So on a whim, I created a Repo to keep track of languages that compile to web assembly. The repo ended up getting over three thousand stars. I honestly didn’t expect it to blow up as much as it did, but it did. That feat fueled my interest in Web Assembly. As I was saying, I wanted to gather Web Assembly developers together for a purpose - to create a common web assembly runtime, a canonical runtime. My attempt at community building didn’t go so well. I sent a couple of emails, and DMs to no avail, or so I thought. It was during this time that Syrus Akbary reached out to me, he pitched the idea he had to build an awesome web assembly runtime, Wasmer, and that he would want me to be involved. He was really excited, and so was I. The only thing was that he said he had to lay down some of the groundwork first. So he worked on it for about a month. Now that I think about it, I should have stuck to him while he laid down the work because when he showed me the progress he had made, I was awe-stricken, but also disadvantaged. A lot of work had been done. Here we were trying to build the web assembly runtime that would take the world by storm, but my knowledge of Rust was meager. Keeping up was hard. Eventually, I had to leave the project, he was incorporating Wasmer as a company, so relocation was being discussed but I wasn’t interested in going to the US. But I think the major deciding factor for me was that I didn’t really align with the management of the project.

#Software Development #Cross Platform App Dev Tools #WebAssembly 50 social mentions

2

Andela

I’ve known about Rust for a very long time, as far back as 2015. It was just a brief encounter. When I say brief, I mean, I installed it on my laptop, and never opened it again. The concepts went over my head a bit. So, I focused on other things. And boy did I have a variety of interests. First, I wanted to build my own software for creating visual effects like Adobe or something like that. Then I tried android programming, then game programming, and maybe one or two more things along the way. But, they didn’t work out. I think the reason why they didn’t work out was that I was trying to build things from scratch without leveraging some of the tools that were already available. Building things from scratch, straight from my IDE, seemed fun. Eventually, after some thinking, I decided to focus on web development, as a full-stack JavaScript developer, and with that, I also got into Andela, a software developer placement network.

#Freelance Marketplace #Work Marketplace #Professional Services 7 social mentions