How long did it take you to feel comfortable with Rust?

Hey everyone! I’m curious about your journey with Rust:
• How long did it take before you felt genuinely confident writing Rust?
• Was there a specific project that made things click for you?
• What tripped you up the most early on?

I’ve been learning Rust for about 5 months now. I feel fairly comfortable with the language — working with the borrow checker, pattern matching, enums, traits, etc.

That said, I still run into moments that confuse me — subtle things like when to use as_ref, as_deref, deref coercion, and small lifetime-related quirks. Coming from C++, I’m used to explicit pointers and references, and while Rust also has *, &, and all that, the mental model is different — and sometimes feels a bit more abstract.

I’m not confused by the difference between Box, Rc, and Arc — I get that part — it’s more the fine-grained stuff that still surprises me.

Would love to hear when Rust started to feel natural to you, and what helped you get there.