Ending the Rust 365 Challenge Early
ChatGPT, your impacts are innumerable.
I cannot justify to myself spending time learning how to do every single thing with Rust anymore. I feel it’s more relevant to my career to be learning how to work with ML, models, and the various other items from the world of AI that I have no clue about.
My mission to spend most of my time this year learning Rust was supposed to be about fun, with the secondary mission of being useful to my career. It has been both of those things, but cannot be priority number one any longer. With more than half the year left, I must change my direction even though I absolutely love Rust, and have no intention to stop using it.
What I Learned
I learned so much in just over 120 days. I started this challenge in Early December, so my posts are offset by around a month.
I would say the biggest impact on my life from learning what I have learned would be:
I can now pretty handily program the RP2040 microcontroller
I learned some very interesting concepts about programming in general. Specifically that I should be a lot more concerned with the intentions of the composers of a language, and that I should try to work with compilers and interpreters, instead of against them.
Seems common sense, but I think it’s rather common that people fight compilers.
I’ve grown as a writer over this time as I’ve composed at least 2 blogs per week each week starting from December 8th.
My understanding of ‘dressing’ class instances so that they wear the hats they need via traits is a concept that is universally applicable to all languages in certain ways.
Why I’m Changing
I am not going to miss this boat that is already leaving the harbor with all the AI experts on it. I’m going to jump in a skiff, zoom out, and get on that ship. This will be an entirely new direction for me so it’s exciting, and I feel that knowing more about how AI works is more career safe than deep understanding of programming languages.
So starting from literally today as I’m writing this, I will begin the process of teaching myself all the needed skills to be an effective contributor in the ML and AI space. Might take months? Might Take Years? I don’t really care though, I still think there is time for me to catch up and be an early expert in the field.
My content will change from here though.
Conclusion
My love of Rust is still there, and I’m going to continue writing Rust, even though my challenge is ending. But now my daily efforts are not going into learning Rust anymore and instead will be going directly into learning how to work with ML and AI systems.
