Most production code is terrible.

Rustacean frustration

In 2019, I joined a coding bootcamp with the dream of becoming a software engineer. It was very much a "you get out what you put into it" deal, and I put everything into it. Not since my teenage addiction to World of Warcraft had anything felt so compelling.

Morning, noon and night, I devoured course materials, exercises and books. After graduating bootcamp, I hit senior engineer within a year, worked for big names like JP Morgan and Monzo, and crossed the final frontier on the core team of a European Space Agency mission simulator.

Along the way, I've worked in six programming languages – but fell in love with one.

Rust is programming at its finest. Through its rich type system, we express concepts both grand and subtle, achieving statically what other languages can only hope to do at runtime.

It guarantees thread-safety, and banishes undefined behaviour to the shadow realm of unsafe. Nil pointer dereferences? Never heard of them.

In 2024, my love affair with Rust took me all the way to RustConf in Montreal, where I delivered my talk, Rust in Space! How Rust is Powering Next-Generation Space Mission Simulators.

But here's the truth: I'm deeply unsatisfied. Want to know why?

Rustacean elation

Training for intermediate and advanced backend engineers is in dire straits. You're no longer entry-level, and you can read an O'Reilly book from cover to cover, but how do you apply that raw knowledge to real-life problems? How do you write truly flexible code that stands up to the chaos of the modern software org?

And how can you perform this epic feat without losing the passion for coding that got you here? How should you feed the spark of curiosity for the world outside your codebase – a world without stakeholders, deadlines or legacy?

There are remarkable backend engineers out there sharing incredible code. By experts, for experts. On undiscoverable blogs. In Times New Roman.

I'm fixing that. How To Code It is a website and newsletter that shares everything I've learned from thousands of hours writing Rust and other languages. 🦀

You'll learn to solve real problems in elegant ways that make your colleagues weep with joy. You'll get practical guides to keeping your codebase – and your team – sane. You'll take your Rust to the next level.

I'd also like to extend an invitation. There are many domains I've never programmed, and I'm sure you have your blind spots too. Let's fill in the blanks together.

Alongside my expertise, I'll also be sharing my experiments – my adventures into Rust unknown. Join me on the journey of discovery. And, if you're a master of the strange lands I discover, reach out and show me how to code it.