Working as a Rust dev
Working as a Rust dev
What essential skills/knowledge would you say are/is required to work as a Rust dev?
I did couple of small/mediumish personal projects in Rust using axum with sea-orm and later tauri with leptos. That's on top of many years of experience working as a Java/Javascript dev and occasionally touching things like Python or Flutter. Most of things like databases and web stuff is transferable but what strictly Rust concepts are required to work as a Rust dev? In what fields it's used the most?
- Rust knowledge
- depends on which area you want to work in
I never worked on low level stuff so I think my best chance is web/desktop stuff. Any specific technologies that are getting popular in companies?
May want to look at computation, so stuff like Rayon. We almost built a compute-heavy part of our web-app in Rust (rest is in Python), and I'd guess a lot of others do the same.
Necessary skills:
- Development processes: advanced git usage (like fixing history after a bad rebase, merging multiple completely divergent branches, etc), issue tracking
- Devops: continuous integration, continuous deployment, Docker (also, how to build your own Docker images out of Rust projects), Kubernetes
- Social: how to interact with coworkers without creating enemies for life
Don't forget debugging! Throughout my carreer, I never really forced myself to just go with debugger (especially since when games are considered, where you are dealing with tens of instances running the same Update, so manual breakpoints are usually harder to use than just scrolling through printed values in a lof) and over-relied on debug logging.
It was a mistake, and took me several years to realize that conditional breakpoints are a thing. And once you get into profiling, memory optimization and what-not, you will be greatefull that you've spend the time getting comfortable with all the debugging tools you can use.
Trying to learn a debugger or profiler as you go through solving a problem at a job sucks. Am currently in the process of having to debug and solve shader performance issue, and oh boy that's a lot of terms and tools I've never seen before, and most of the colleagues are as dumbfounded as I am, since when porting games you usually don't need to deal with low-level rendering.
I'm comfortable with debugging, but I rarely use it with Rust. With the language being so strict in everything, it's clear most of the time what's happening, and most situations can be resolved by simple logging of variables.
In JavaScript, I have to use the debugger all the time, since variables can get some really weird invalid values with the completely wrong type.
Like other programming languages there are no general answers. Im currently doing Bioinformatics, learning Rust was the easiest part.
One of my friends is doing DevOps in Rust within the crypto world. I don't even know half the words he is using to describe his work.
It all depends on what part you want to work with. But some understanding of the close to hardware aspects of rust wouldn't hurt, comes in handy for debugging and optimising.
But I say that as somone who has a background (and job) in hard realtime c++ (writing control software for industrial vehicles). We recently did our first Rust project as a test at work though! I hope there will be more. But the question then becomes how to teach 200+ devs (over time, gradually presumably). For now it is just like 3 of us who know rust and are pushing for this and a few more that are interested.