A project I did some time ago while streaming my coding on Twitch.tv. It is a chat bot for the Twitch stream chat completely written in Rust in an asynchronous manner. It would connect to the chat and you could paste commands like !help into the chat and the chat bot would respond with a predefined response to it. The project got to a point where it was working by defining commands directly within the code, but eventually I wanted to have a much more dynamic version, where you could define commands on the fly with special command creation commands and I also had a lot of ideas on how to do that, but shortly after getting to this point, I stopped streaming on Twitch and I therefore also stopped working on this project. I really like to continue working on this project, and when I do I will also continue streaming it.
I have always heard a lot about Rust and its popularity among software developers. I mainly heard it from the StackOverflow surveys, where Rust has been the most-liked language for many years in a row. The moments I heard so much good about it I wanted to try it and see why it would be regarded as such a good language. And eventually, I also found a good idea to start learning Rust. This was the start of this project. I was starting it while also starting to stream my coding on Twitch.tv.
I learned a lot about Rust while working on this project and I also understood why Rust was so highly regarded. It took some time to get to some working code as the compiler would complain about any kind of issue. But I noticed very quickly that after you have reached a point without any apparent issues you could be extremely sure, that your program would really run how you intend it to without any problems. It would not crash due to some unforeseen runtime error. If you would test your basic functionality well, you could be quite sure, that there is no issue at all. The learning curve was quite steep, but in the end, I learned to love Rust like a very good mentor, who teaches you about the necessity of embracing delayed gratification.
For some months I was streaming my coding on Twitch.tv and I was exclusively working on this chatbot. It was a nice experience as it is something very different to code while you know that people are watching you. But it was a good experience and there have been some people from other places of the world which I got in touch with. And that is amazing.