Coding challenges retrospective

Over the last few months, I have practiced coding challenges (here).

I had two goals in mind:

• Improving my Rust mastery
• Go deep into the internals and concepts of my day-to-day tools

I had many projects such as:

• Building a REST API (with axum then rocket.rs) with a TODO List/Kanban
• Using WASM to build a browser (client-side) Hangman
• Play with the FFI build a CLI-based SQLite app
• Playing with concurrent IO (tokio) implementing redis/memcached clones
• Reading/writing regular format (xxd/zip clones)
• Playing with protocol (a DNS client)
• Dealing with kernel calls (docker clone)
• Implement some distributed systems tactics (rate limiter, reverse proxy)

I have learned few interesting things, such as:

• DNS is actually a very complex protocol
• tar stores length in octal
• GNU tar implements UStar
• Knowing that you can implements a tool is really different from implementing it, it helped me to gain a lot of confidence in my skill
• Even quick and dirty code can be a first step and work enough to be a good proof-of-concept