I've been learning and working with Rust since early this summer, and I quite frankly love it. It's also made me a much better developer than I used to be.

Who Am I?

I am currently on a team of one where I am maintaining a 20 year old C /etc legacy application, and have been working on this product for seven years now.

So I have experience dealing with all the different eras of C and other languages involved in the product suite, and balancing the need for modern rewrites and refactorings of old code, and achieving productive speed and results.

Okay, now, get to the meat!

So, one thing that really appealed to me from the start for Rust was the way it was designed to eliminate common mistakes that can be eliminated by the language/tooling, from the enums, to the powerful borrowing and ownership model.

It forced me to learn more about what was going on underneath the hood, and through this subreddit, exposed me to a lot of very advanced resources on topics as varied as type theory, to exception handling, to asynchronous programming.

But what really happened to make me a better developer is that the mistakes I was making were ones the tooling and language design are made to catch. So I'd make them, get a compiler error, and that would interrupt my flow.

So then I started pre-emptively coding to avoid those errors, ie, writing correct Rust code. I had to think about ownership, borrows, references, and type theory as I designed and wrote code, in order to avoid compiler errors.

IE, negative reinforcement made me adopt behaviors to avoid the perceived negative reinforcement, which made me learn correct habits of coding.

And this has carried through to my day job. The C code I write is now more correct, safer, and effective, than it was previously, because of what I learned from Rust.

So this is a thank you to the community and the dev teams involved.