I'm always reading about other topics in software development. Over the last few years I've read about web design, JavaScript, Ruby, agile methodologies and practices, Go and even Objective-C. Reading books on these topics has provided some insight into their respective topics but with the exception of Ruby and agile methodologies I haven't been able to take what I've read and use it in a practical exercise.

A couple of years ago I read about the Go language from Google. So I started reading a couple of books about it. Since then I haven't written more than one hundred lines of code in Go. Was that time spent reading about Go a waste? I think so.

More recently the Rust language has peaked my interest but I haven't started reading about it yet. I've been asking myself if there's something I can work towards using Rust that will let me learn the language. Using Rust in a practical use hasn't been something I've been able to come up with until a couple of days ago. There I was reading Hacker News over the weekend when I seen an article about writing a shell in C. Well, why not write it in Rust?

Building a shell in Rust should give me the chance to explore and learn the language but also give me the chance to try out something other than web development. I've been working with Ruby on Rails for over four years now and while I enjoy the work, I have been looking at a systems programming language to learn. We'll see how it goes.