Hello.

This would be my first article in what is, hopefully, a series on my entanglement with the Rust programming language. Seeing as I like to speak to myself sometimes, you will find leakages of my mental monologues in here—and they might have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. No vex.

That said, I should probably start by stating that I’ve had my fair share of experience with programming. My journey began a long time ago, back in primary school around 2004/2005 (the date could be off by a year or two), when I first saw a computer at my school, Meved Model International School, Oginigba, Port Harcourt.

I remember there was a short queue of my classmates waiting to “touch” the computer. Like any young child, I was intrigued. When it was my turn, I pressed the letter G. I remember this insignificant detail weirdly well. I had no idea that I was supposed to press and release the key, so I held it down, and a long sequence GGGGGGGGGGGGG appeared on the screen before I was quickly asked to stop. LOL. I moved on and made way for the next kid.

It wouldn’t be until 2010 before I had access to a computer again. This time, I accompanied my friend (and neighbour), Kemah Barida, to a computer centre in Bori. He was already familiar with using one—I can’t recall where he learned, maybe at school—and he paid for time while I watched. There were several computers in the room, and two kids—likely the owner’s children—were playing what looked like very colourful games in the background. (It was really more of a room than a facility, but I digress.) In my 12-year-old head, it felt like pure luxury.

I don’t remember exactly what Kemah went there to do, though now that I think about it, it might have been research for a school assignment. What I do remember is basking in the euphoria of seeing—and possibly touching—a computer again. I replayed the scene excitedly in my head for the rest of the evening.

Fast forward about two years later. I had graduated from secondary school, and my mum paid ₦9,000 out of an agreed ₦12,000 for me to take computer lessons at David’s Investment, 51 Mayor Street, Bori. I trained under Barisiletam (Asile, as we fondly call him), who would later become my mentor, my first boss, and—years later—the person who gifted me my first laptop. I was beyond excited to get started. Also, my mom never really paid the ₦3,000 balance. Either she did, and Asile would take it or something else, I couldn’t say.

Over the next few weeks, I was introduced to the typewriter. Disappointingly. :(

I typed the same text repeatedly on blank A4 sheets. There were folders full of these papers—typed by my predecessors—some of them so neat and error-free they made me jealous. I, on the other hand, always found a way to mess up somewhere on the page. I never completed a full page without errors before I was finally moved on to the next stage of my training: actually using a computer.

Unfortunately, I’m not very good with hardware, so I can’t tell you exactly what machines we used. What I do know is that they were desktop computers with massive CRT monitors. We had a couple of LCD screens too, but those came a bit later, I think. The keyboards were clunky and loud, but the noise made us feel like badass typers—it amplified our perceived dexterity.

Almost immediately, I was introduced to Mavis Beacon, where I spent the next couple of weeks. I vividly remember the first time I completed a full session in Penguin Crossing. I was amazed—I’d been trying for weeks. At that point, my typing speed hovered around 30 words per minute. My last measured peak was about 80 WPM a year or two later.

At this time, I knew almost nothing about programming. Still, this experience alone was enough to make me abandon my plan to study medicine in favour of computer science. Three years later, I’d head to university to do just that—and finally learn, in a classroom setting, what programming really, really was.

I wrote my first “Hello, World” program in 2016 at Rivers State University, Port Harcourt. Guess what language it was in. Of course—Python. It was the first programming language we learned, and I studied the documentation a lot, despite understanding less than 10% of what I was reading.

Eventually, we moved on to C++, then Java—the language I first explored extensively. By 2019, I was rounding off school and building an automated attendance system using face detection and recognition. I never fully completed the software, and I didn’t know enough about GitHub at the time to store the code properly, so it eventually got lost on some computer in the school library.

What I failed to mention is that by 2018, I had done my internship at elitePath Software. That was where I first properly learned HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. For the first time, I found a language I could naturally resonate with: JavaScript. I fondly referred to it as the language of the gods because of its many quirks. That introduction—eventually leading to Node.js—guided me into backend development, which is what I would go on to build a career in.

I later dabbled in C#—not for very long, but long enough to land a spot on Microsoft’s .NET Show, where I was invited to speak about the challenges of distributed system design. That video is still on YouTube. After my time with C#, I started thinking about exploring a different space from the traditional API development I’d been doing for a couple of years. That curiosity eventually led me to Rust.

Between work and personal commitments, it’s been difficult to fully immerse myself in the Rust ecosystem. But in recent weeks, I’ve decided to be more intentional, and I’ve taken things up a notch. That’s why tonight I decided to write about Rust’s unit type (). However, since I’ve made this article unnecessarily long and delightfully distracting, it might be best to save that for another article—probably with a very similar title.