When I see such cool projects, I feel very overwhelmed. How do you get started with Rust and master basics to even attempt doing such a thing? Can OP explain?
Likewise. Not to go onto too much of tangent, but on a more personal note I've been generally struggling with this feeling a lot lately.
I've been a professional software developer for almost 10 years, and I _know_ I'm competent (and not an impostor) as demonstrated by my current position and ability to ship things.
However, lately after viewing developer blogs I become overwhelmed that I actually don't know enough and am not a "real" developer. I seem to have formed a notion of an ideal developer in my head and I compare myself against this imagined construct which leads to these feelings. I admire how these people have so much deep knowledge and can express themselves so clearly and concisely, then wonder why I am not like that.
I barely have the energy after work after taking care of my family to do anything further, and I know programming isn't everything but I do have a desire to learn more and improve myself.
I recognize this isn't healthy nor is it rational, but it's just a feeling I can't shake lately.
What you're describing is very common amongst developers. So common in fact, that I've written a post about this https://alic.dev/blog/comparisons
In short: recognizing your insecurities is the first step. The next step is figuring out what's important to you, shedding impossible to achieve and irrational ambitions, prioritizing your goals in life, and articulating concrete steps to further them.
Well, you're probably comparing yourself against the top 1% of developers. It's okay to not be the very best, being in the top 30% of this field already is very rewarding.
I happen to personally know the author, and I'm not really surprised he pulled this off. Using him as a baseline of who is a real developer his extremely unhealthy. Please don't :)
Well, _I_ feel impostor syndrome half the times I open HN honestly!
I did have a bit of experience with VMs before, I wrote many years ago a short series of posts about it on my blog, and at my previous job I dabbled a bit in JVM byte code to solve one very unusual problem we had for a customer. I also read the _amazing_ https://craftinginterpreters.com/ years ago and that gave me some ideas.
But this project was definitely big and complex. It took me a lot of time, and it got abandoned a couple of times, like many of my side projects. But I'm happy I finished it. :-)
Not OP nor am I a Rust expert. I can speak regarding another technology: sockets.
I've been deep-diving into sockets recently. 2 weeks ago I had only a high-level understanding of sockets (learned from casually reading manpages, docs, blog posts, etc.). I decided to read as much as possible because I wanted to understand networking fundamentals, and after a week I learned enough to write some sockets code in Python and C. I know Python quite well, so reviewing the ``sockets'' library made more sense after my deep dive.
If you want to get better at technology A using language X, I suggest either reading/watching as much as you can about tech A, and build stuff with it in language Y. Then you can circle back to learning language X and you've already mastered much of the concepts around technology A.
Break things down. A simple language VM is going to have a way to represent objects in memory, a byte code interpreter, a simple garbage collector, and a way to load things.
A byte code interpret is a stack, some way to represent functions on that stack, and then a loop to interpret beach byte code and move the program counter.
How much do you code in your free time? Like average hours per week?
If it's zero (and no judgement from me if it is; plenty of other things to focus on), then it shouldn't be surprising that someone for whom that number is (speculatively) 10-20 hours per week on average for years has impressive side projects.
Do some embedded work, implement a bare metal program on an ARM microcontroller in C or Rust. Make a LED blink. Then, make the same LED blink in pure ASM. The RP2040 is easy to bring up.
