Bob Belderbos
When friction becomes your best friend, meet #Rust 🦀
> "I never had the feeling that I was fighting the borrow checker. The error messages were my friends right out of the gate. They had a good explanation of the error, but also a hint about what you could do differently."
Bob Belderbos
AI is useful, but you need real *friction* to really learn and avoid deskilling.
If you want a genuine challenge that forces you to level up, building a complete project in Rust as a Pythonista is one of the best ways to stay sharp and future-proof your career. 🚀
Bob Belderbos
Here is the full breakdown of Jochen's transition from Python -> Rust,
Bob Belderbos
The rewrite turned a parser that collected every token into a list up front into one that reads tokens on demand in a single pass.
His coach Jim remarked:
> "This is such a clean functional style API for your tokenizer, it's evolved and matured nicely."
Bob Belderbos
To me it's not only the real world app development our cohorts mirror, it sparks something in people to give it their all so they come out pleasantly surprised how far they could stretch. 💪
Bob Belderbos
But! He pair programmed his way out of it thanks to the compiler:
Jochen:
> "Those 78 errors were my path of what I needed to fix to get to the results. You change something up the chain and 78 reduces to 50, and so on down the line. It is your implementation guide."
Bob Belderbos
It's like having a 200% test suite for free; you feel confident making changes.
Bob Belderbos
78 errors 💥
Talking about an intimidating language 😅
Bob Belderbos
This is Jochen, who also said:
> "Rust is for people who want to be punished."
But after diving deep writing a performant JSON parser, he also concluded he can trust it more than Python.
Bob Belderbos
The clearest sign of how his thinking changed came in the final week of our Rust cohort.
Three of his four benchmark datasets were already beating Python; one wasn't. He suspected the parser was copying the entire input onto the heap instead of borrowing it.
Bob Belderbos
So he changed the entry point to take a borrowed string with an explicit lifetime (a lifetime is Rust's way of letting you reference data without copying it, while proving the reference can't outlive the data) and ran `cargo check`
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