March 17, 2026

Learning Rust: My Approach as a 30-Year IT Veteran

Ubuntu is quietly rewriting the core of the OS in Rust. I don't need to become a Rust developer — I need to read it, tweak it, and build a couple of CLI tools. Here's the plan.

Ubuntu has been quietly rewriting core system utilities in Rust. sudo-rs is replacing sudo on the roadmap. uutils is a Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils that’s already shipping in some distributions. If I’m running Ubuntu in production — and I am — then sooner or later I’m going to be staring at a Rust source file trying to figure out why something broke.

I’m not becoming a Rust developer. I’m a 30-year IT guy, not a junior who’s going to spend nine months mastering ownership and lifetimes. What I need is narrower: read it, tweak it, and build the occasional CLI tool that compiles to a fast, self-contained binary I can drop on any box.

Here’s how I’m scoping it.

Step 1 — Read and tweak Rust code

Goal: open a sudo-rs source file or a uutils PR and actually follow what’s happening.

Timeframe: 1–2 weeks at ~30 min/day.

Focus:

• Variables and mutability (let vs let mut)
• Functions and type annotations
• match and pattern matching
• Ownership and borrowing (references vs mutable references) — just enough to not be confused
• Basic error handling with Result and ?

Resources:

• Rust By Example — the format I actually learn from. Code first, prose second.
• The Rust Book, chapters 1–5. Stop before lifetimes. I’ll come back if a real problem demands it.
• rust-analyzer in VS Code for inline type hints. Non-negotiable.

I’m deliberately skipping lifetimes and advanced trait work in this pass. The goal is to read, not to author production code.

Step 2 — Build small CLI tools

Goal: muscle memory with cargo, crates, and the basic flow of producing a working binary.

Timeframe: 2–3 weeks at 30–60 min/day.

Projects I’m going to build:

1. Network reachability checker. Feed it a file of hostnames or IPs, get back which are reachable and their response time. This replaces a Bash script I already use.
2. Log file summarizer. Point it at /var/log/syslog or an Apache access log, get back top N error messages with counts. Same premise — I have a Bash version today.
3. (Bonus) A fastfetch-style info fetcher that just prints CPU/memory stats the way I want to see them.

Skills that fall out of those:

• cargo new and cargo run
• Pulling in crates from crates.io
• Parsing CLI args with clap
• Reading files and stdin
• Colored output with colored

Building things I’d actually use is how I learn a language. Toy projects from a tutorial don’t stick.

Where I’m stopping

If I never go past Step 2, I’ll already be able to:

• Understand and tweak Rust-based system utilities when they break.
• Write my own high-performance CLI tools instead of Bash scripts that fall over at scale.
• Be ready when more of Ubuntu’s core is Rust-based — because it will be.

That’s the bar. Not “Rust developer.” Not “contribute to the language.” Read, tweak, ship small tools. Anything beyond that can wait until I have a real reason.

Book me on this one in about a month. If I don’t have at least one of those three tools compiled and running, tell me I said so.