Struct show_notes::interview::rbr_2017::pete_lyons::Transcript

pub struct Transcript;

Pete Lyons

Chris: Hello! Can you tell us your name and a little bit about yourself?

Pete: Uh, my name is Pete Lyons, and I currently am an independent consultant focused on Node.

Chris: Cool! So what brings you to Rust Belt Rust and the Rust language in general?

Pete: I got interested in Rust - I’ve always sort of been interested in doing systems programming, but a little bit anxious about buffer overflows, and sort of the error-prone-ness of it - and when I learned about Rust, I thought, like, “Oh, maybe this has removed some of the things that were preventing me from diving in to systems programming, and so I’m trying to learn Rust now.

Chris: Awesome. How long have you been at it with learning Rust?

Pete: I actually just tracked this last night - I’ve spent 39 hours so far, reading the Rust book and doing exercises and so forth, and next week I’m headed to the Recur (?) Center to spend six weeks full time learning Rust.

Chris: That’s awesome. I’m kind of a little jealous. That sounds really fun. Do you have any ideas of where in particular you might like to use it yet - things like that, or…?

Pete: Um, I have some projects. I’d like to make a command line utility to help developers understand, like SSH keys, and cryptocertificates um, from, like, a dev ops side, and other than that, kind of, yeah, command line utilities and developer tools.

Chris: That’s awesome. What has been best so far in learning Rust, and then maybe also worst?

Pete: Um, I think, I’m not really sure I have a good answer to what things so far. I found the thing that was difficult for me is the format of the standard library documentation I find difficult to scan and read, so there’s like a lot of information on the screen that doesn’t seem well-differentiated, and it just seems like a wall of text and I’m a little bit disoriented. So, that has been a little bit of a struggle, but otherwise, I think the - I guess I would say - the best thing, I think, is the crates and cargo design, and I feel like the team that did that had a lot of good lessons learned from their predecessors, so I’m pretty psyched about that.

Chris: Excellent. Thank you. Anything else that jumps out at you, here at Rust Belt Rust, or comments to the community, etcetera?

Pete: I think the community is great; everyone’s been really friendly, um, and the conference has been, you know, the conference has been great, and I’ve been learning a lot, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Chris: Awesome. Thanks for your time.

Pete: Thank you!