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I'm a linux admin with very little development experience (amateur at bash scripting, did some python in school, understand the concepts of object-oriented programming, but that's pretty much it) doing rustlings in my spare time. I want to be able to contribute to open source projects and be able to understand more of the discussion in the FOSS space, but it's pretty hard to see the big picture tbh and I don't know if I'm wasting my time.
Wasting your time? impossible. All you're learning will at least gently affect everything else you do. Will you contribute meaningfully to foss? only time will tell.
Like any craft, you git good by doing. The first program I wrote was in ASIC to fix 2500 computers on a LAN. We were a small shop (7 ppl) providing on-site support for a large complex. We were gearing up to have to go to 2500 desks and edit win.ini to make sure Vshare was set up for ccMail.
I stayed late a couple nights and wrote a little app to copy win.ini line by line to a new file and fix vshare in the process. Then, it ran some sanity checks to make sure the file looked good, and the files were swapped out. Saved us a LOT of time.
A few jobs later, we had a Cold Fusion/IIS server that would occasionally corrupt logs and we needed reports on the logs for our clients. I couldn't nail down what caused the error. The files were multiple gigabytes in the day where an entire company could comfortably work off of 2GB. I found the problem, they were missing a linebreak once in a while, and the analytics app we were using would just shit the bed on that.
I needed to break up the offending lines or at least remove them. I didn't have enough time or space to copy them to a new file.
This was pre-2000 so the languages and tooling were pretty dumb.
I learned some PHP, but memory was an issue, abandoned I learned some Perl that worked, but it took many hours, and I'd have to dedicate a box to just fixing the logs every morning. I finally bit the bullet and learned enough C to fix it; it only took an hour to run.
Since then, I've just been learning to solve problem after problem and have chosen tools that I didn't know. Keep on amateuring. Do small projects and cron jobs with different languages/tools.
Branch out into new languages when you have to start finding hacks to do things in current languages. Once you get good at working on smaller pictures, the big pictures won't look as daunting.
I have zero programming experience and zero computer know how at all. I am, however, out of a job and in desperate need for cash for the simple basics. So I dunno how long this is going to take but not being able to see the big picture and not knowing if I'm wasting my time.... oh my christ do I relate to that. Even the request had me staring at it like "Oh god." I did warn them that there was no guarantee it would ever materialize due to my own failings and if it did it would be a hot damn minute.
I have so many saved tabs right now about rust and apis and docker and sql stuff. For someone whose total computer knowledge is "Settings where the things go" and "don't delete system32" this is... terrifying.
Don't feel bad if jobs don't drop out of the sky just because you learned a little rust. Rust jobs do not abound, even for experienced devs. That said, its an interesting and challenging language and doing some work in it can show you're motivated and willing to work through some shit to get things done. Google-fu is a primary skill for everyone in the field.
Oh I'm not doing this to primarily learn Rust for anything else other than this specific job. I am going to be looking into other languages later but this is just to put food on the table for me and the cat. It's evidently a rather simple thing, to an extent, so hopefully it won't take me too long.
godspeed! the rust community is knowledgeable and helpful. check out the discourse server if you haven't already.
I can't believe I'm suggesting this, but I have absolutely no programming experience and no knowledge of anything that happens behind the usual user-facing side of a UI and I just finished a project involving a ton of SQL and VBA and API calls using only ChatGPT. I basically just told it to treat me like a moron and gave it all the details I could. It took a while troubleshooting the dozens of errors along the way, but everything works now and I learned a ton.