Where did this come from?

So, it’s March of 2022, and I know I want to build an app that tells me which ferry to go to. Where to begin?

I started, wisely, by deciding to learn a new language. I’ve spent most of my life coding in C or C++, with the occasional dabble in JS. For this effort, I thought the smartest thing to do would be to write it in Rust and deploy with Docker. So not only am I writing a new tool, I’m learning a new language and a new deployment tool to do it. The first month was pretty brutal — a ton of work just making sense of error messages. Rust has made some really significant philosophical developments over legacy languages, and a lot of the manuals assume that I’ve already understood those things. Like what’s a “Future” and how does it relate to a “Promise?” Why is “Promise” a type? How do I deal with “Option” types?

A bunch of my recent work has also been in embedded systems, IOT stuff. Working with web design, with front end, back end, data collection routines, and containers, is totally different. The idea that some information simply isn’t available to the front end was new to me. Additionally, Yew (Rust’s web dev language) is kind of immature still, and lacks some pretty basic functionality, so I had to learn how to make Rust-Yew call JS, which … is really easy, once you know how to do it, but it isn’t really well documented.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who’s following along for their patience. I hope to make this into the go-to tool for anyone riding ferries, but there are a lot of interesting challenges. As always, thanks for the feedback, and to those who keep reminding me to write up that feedback module. : )