Today was my first day at the physical Hub! It’s heartening to be in a physical environment that is the accumulated result of such creativity, and in a social environment fine-tuned to remove obstacles to learning. It’s clear that a lot of care has gone into this.

Today was the pair programming workshop, which I almost didn’t sign up for at first because I was so petrified. But my partner and I ended up having a great time creating a version of Mastermind!

It was educational to see the range in aspects of the game that each team chose to tackle. I was astonished to see some people create colorful game UI before anything else! My default approach was to create an outline of the high-level game logic, but that meant that we didn’t finish writing all our functions. Still others chose to implement a specific part of the game, like evaluating the player’s turn. It was also interesting to see this being done using languages and techniques I’m not familiar with. Today I learned what a Python dataclass is!

The other thing I did today was get started with Rust. The installation was uneventful (always a good sign). I also completed the first exercise in the Rust Book, which was programming a simple guessing game.

Initial impressions: coming from Python, the syntax is really spiky! The book is doing a good job of explaining why things are the way they are without glossing over too much or going into unnecessary detail. I’m sure all will become clear in Chapter N.

It occurred to me that reimplementing the Mastermind game in Rust might be a good exercise, once I’ve found my footing.