My first non-trivial program in Rust was a Markov chain. Right now I’m trying to build a REST API with Actix and a Mongo database. So far it has been an interesting experience.

I had a pretty good time rewriting various coreutils in Rust. I liked it because the difficulty of doing so ranges from something as easy as the true command, where you simply exit with a success status, to more challenging stuff like writing a basic shell.

Granted, it’s not that complicated to write CLIs with simple inputs and outputs, so maybe it’s not valuable for others but it certainly helped me understand Rust better than before.

make a game engine

_/s

When I’m curious about a language, I usually first build some implementation of a perceptron or basic neural network, as well as a (usually very bad) text editor.

I feel like once I have those behind me, I’ve got some fundamentals and can dive deeper into what makes the specific language actually special :)

perhaps a simple turn based card game with the ability to add custom cards