I recently went through the rust fundamentals with Alfredo Deza and Noah Gift, as part of the rust programming specialisation

My context is that I have done some work with rust at iwoca, including some concurrency with threads, tokio, serde and kafka.

The reason I could do most of these things is because I have some C and C++ experience under my belt, which allowed me to borrow some concepts like passing by reference, using struct for most things, compiler workflow, C++ STL, etc.

I also went through the rustlings course without major issues to prepare for the work.

I wanted to do the coursera specialisation is that I want something on my CV and fresh experience, as I expect that the job market will reward rust over python and I like it anyway.

On the course itself: I think it would have worked better when I had no exposure to rust at all. It is aimed for people with experience on dynamic languages given that the reference was either python or javascript.

I think the topics were adequate for a beginner course. cargo, variable scopes, structs, data structures, strings, vectors. All very reasonable.

The things I didn’t already know were the copilot stuff, vscode and codespaces. All of them were not related to rust directly, though I understand that most developers nowadays don’t go through the hassle of setting up their environment locally. I wish they explored anything other than the microsoft stack (github, codespaces, copilot).

Something to note is how many LLM services are used for the courses:

  • A transcription AI service
  • A cards generation AI service
  • audio normalising with AI
  • The environments with vs code that allow copilot (encouraged)

They seem very energy intensive to be offered for free automatically. I wonder if coursera is going to keep them free long term.

Overall it was good but definitely not for me. The other 4 look more promising so I look forward to them.