I thought rust was overcomplicated but changed my mind

When I was at the beginning of the 3rd year of uni, I think, I decided to start working hard and actually learning programming instead of just procrastinating all day, so I spent about a year with Python. Doing small projects with Pandas, scikit-learn, langchain, some Django and Flask. It was comfortable but 0 rewarding, no emotion, just following YouTube and course tutorials, like "wtf I am actually doing?"

Back at uni's 2nd year I remembered I had a tiny bit of C from the DSA class and genuinely liked it more than I expected. So when I heard about Rust I got curious. Read the first 3 chapters of the famous book, built the damn guessing game, thought "this is really cool" but then never touched it again. Python was where the AI hype was happening, and I told myself Rust was just too complex, unnecessary.

A few months later a friend suggested me to get actual coding experience through open source. He was already contributing to a project and nudged me to check it out. I found a small easy issue, literally write 1 line, so I made the change, pushed it, opened a PR, got my first ever code review and then something clicked that no tutorial ever made click. It rushed into my brain like pure dopamine. I got hooked. Started picking up more issues. Started reviewing other people's PRs. Became a contributor. Learned a lot of git, low level web stuff and of course, Rust, by doing it. If tutorials won't give you that, a real project with real people might, you know, that human will to act in group. That was what worked for me at least.

The project that pulled me in is a Rust web framework called Rapina btw, if you're curious. The issues are approachable and the team is welcoming. But honestly the framework doesn't matter, find any open source project in the language you want to learn and try one issue. Search for "good first issues" and just start.

TLDR: Spent a year doing Python tutorials going nowhere. A friend dragged me into contributing to an open source Rust project and it changed everything. Find a real project, try one issue, that's it.