Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Koan-ing around

 In what I do daily, unfortunately I spend more hours than I care for in very uneventful meetings. You know those kinds that when you go to you either get dismissed for what you say or you end up contributing less than 3 minutes worth of comments. Another down side of this meeting even realising the facts above, the whole world would go topsy turvy when you miss one of these useless meetings. So you can say that I have a lot of free fidget time on my hands. A few hours here, a few hours there really adds up to a lot. So I decided as an extension to my basic tutorials of Rust, I decided to advance to try out my hands in doing their version of Koans called "Rustlings". It's been great ! 

Coupled together with the great error messages of the Rust engine gives another dimension to Rust's Koan - Rustlings. Learn to love the descriptive error messages and you will begin to think of it like your own private Rust tutor. You can get started with Rustlings here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings

The exercises are short enough (at least the starting few) that you don't get over invested to the point someone actually notices that you are not paying attention during these meetings. They are however good enough to test your understanding of Rust syntax and language structure. 

It tests you on syntax, logical structure and some basic usage of popular built-in libraries. So, get off your laurels and stop flittering away your hours in useless meetings, instead spend it polishing or sharpening the axe. All of us have the same hours of the day, how we decide to use those hours though separates the wheat from chaff. Happy koaning around ! Also, Koans are very popular in most languages so if your interest is not in Rust just try googling for <you language>+koans and most probably will find something out there that will butter your toast. Hasn't failed me yet. 

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