Matchertools is my “hello world” project in rust, and I have been chipping away at it slowly and erratically for the past couple of months. You can now find my humble crate here. The crate exposes an API that implements the Gale-Shapley algorithm for the stable marriage problem. Read the wiki. No really, read the linked Wikipedia page. Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth won a Nobel prize for this in 2012. Spoiler alert – unlike what the name indicates, the algorithm has little to do with marriages.
This project is so nascent that it is easier for me to list what it does not have:
- No documentation
- No examples
- Shaky integration tests
- No code style whatsoever. I haven’t subjected the repo to rustfmt yet (gasp!)
- Duct-tape code.
- Not nearly enough code comments.
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I had recently adopted a new “philosophy” in life:
Discipline will take you farther than motivation alone ever will
Definitely not me, and more a catch-phrase than philosophy
Most of my side projects do not make it even this far. I go “all-in” for the first couple of days and then my enthusiasm runs out and the project is abandoned before it reaches any meaningful milestone.
But I consciously rate limited myself this time. I had only one aim – work on matchertools every day. I did not really care about the amount of time I spent on the project every day, as long as I made some progress. This also meant that some days I would just read a chapter from the wonderful rust book and that would be it. However, I could not stick to even this plan despite the rather lax constraints – life got in the way. So my aim soon degenerated into “work on matchertools semi-regularly, whenever I can, but be (semi) regular about it“. Thus in two months, I taught myself enough rust to shabbily implement a well-known algorithm. Sarcasm very much intended.
Though I was (am) horrified at the painfully slow pace of the project, the “be slow and semi-regular but keep at it” approach did bear results:
- I learned a little rust. I am in love with the language. The documentation is superb!
- I produced something, which is far better than my side-project-output in the past 18 months – nothing.
Besides, I have realized that much of what happens around me is unplanned and unpredictable to a larger degree than I had thought. I am currently working on revamping the way I plan things and the way I react when my plans inevitably fail. A little Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to help, but more on that later.
Kevin Martin Jose 