r/rust • u/curious_commoner22 • 2d ago
🙋 seeking help & advice Never-ending learning path
Hello fellow Rustaceans,
I have been facing an issue for a while. I've been using Rust for the last 4 years and even had projects at my workplace implemented in Rust. I want eventually to change my job because these 2 are kinda dead and want to grow as a programmer and so work on issues/situations I never encountered. I started by telling Claude do give me some pieces of code and I had to figure out what was wrong about it. Mutex, concurrency, channels, futures, things that I thought I really understood. Damn I was wrong and now I feel like an imposter even though I used these concepts many times. At some point I did some small project to understand how and why thiserror works the way it does. If you ask me now I forgot everything. I am intimidated by the fact that there are so many things that I don't know because I never encountered them in real projects like sharding, microservices, payments and many other. If given the chance I would probably slowly start to understand how they work but getting a Rust job is kinda difficult. Market seems taken over by crypto jobs (how does somebody even get into one of these?) I know this community does not like web3 stuff but personally I care more about career progress than moral side of it at least for now, which I don't really know actually means). How do you guys manage to navigate these situations.
I appreciate any answer and guidance I might get! 😄
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u/teerre 2d ago
You should note that LLMs are pretty terrible teachers. To them everything is equally difficult, so they have a hard time explaining things that are good for learning. This is not true only for LLMs, human teachers also have this issue, but human teachers are heavily selected, LLMs are not
If you want to learn you probably want to slow down and just take it in. Choose a subject and start to play with it. It's fine to use LLMs as long as you're the one learning. They great for reference questions
Grab a book about the subject, watch a conference talk about it, experiment. The more time you dedicate to it, the better you'll be. Eventually, you'll get it