Building Nocode with Rustlang.
Tags: rust, fun, story, developer
Published: 2022-06-05 05:27:20

I’ve known about Rust for a very long time, as far back as 2015. It was just a brief encounter. When I say brief, I mean, I installed it on my laptop, and never opened it again. The concepts went over my head a bit. So, I focused on other things. And boy did I have a variety of interests. First, I wanted to build my own software for creating visual effects like Adobe or something like that. Then I tried android programming, then game programming, and maybe one or two more things along the way. But, they didn’t work out. I think the reason why they didn’t work out was that I was trying to build things from scratch without leveraging some of the tools that were already available. Building things from scratch, straight from my IDE, seemed fun. Eventually, after some thinking, I decided to focus on web development, as a full-stack JavaScript developer, and with that, I also got into [Andela](https://andela.com/), a software developer placement network. 

While waiting for placement at Andela, I started something. I wanted to create a community of developers who had already worked on WebAssembly projects in the past. A bit of a back story is in order now. During my exploratory phase before I settled for web development, Web Assembly was announced. So on a whim, I created a [Repo ](https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs)to keep track of languages that compile to web assembly. The repo ended up getting over three thousand stars. I honestly didn’t expect it to blow up as much as it did, but it did. That feat fueled my interest in Web Assembly. As I was saying, I wanted to gather Web Assembly developers together for a purpose - to create a common web assembly runtime, a canonical runtime. My attempt at community building didn’t go so well. I sent a couple of emails, and DMs to no avail, or so I thought. It was during this time that [Syrus Akbary](https://github.com/syrusakbary) reached out to me, he pitched the idea he had to build an awesome web assembly runtime, [Wasmer](https://wasmer.io/), and that he would want me to be involved. He was really excited, and so was I. The only thing was that he said he had to lay down some of the groundwork first. So he worked on it for about a month. Now that I think about it, I should have stuck to him while he laid down the work because when he showed me the progress he had made, I was awe-stricken, but also disadvantaged. A lot of work had been done. Here we were trying to build the web assembly runtime that would take the world by storm, but my knowledge of Rust was meager. Keeping up was hard. Eventually, I had to leave the project, he was incorporating Wasmer as a company, so relocation was being discussed but I wasn’t interested in going to the US. But I think the major deciding factor for me was that I didn’t really align with the management of the project.

I stayed off Rust in a professional capacity for a while but contributed to some open source projects during that time, I even started some of my own, one of them being [Gigamono ](https://github.com/gigamono)- The most comprehensive no-code platform you’ve never seen. Yeah, never seen. Right now, due to the intensity of my job, I am not actively working on most of Gigamono. The parts of it that still have my attention are: The web assembly runtime, and a programming language that goes with it.

Currently, I work at [fission.codes](https://fission.codes/), and I have to say, it’s right up my alley. I wasn’t expecting to get the job. In fact, I didn’t really take the application seriously. But to my surprise, the CEO reached out to me to schedule a call, which I missed. I was really tired that day, so I slept off. I reached out to the CEO apologizing for missing the call, and trying to reschedule. Thankfully, he did. The interview went smoothly, and I got the job. 

At Fission, I’m the only Rust developer, and I love the kind of things we are building. Something we are working on is a web-native file system built on top of IPFS (Interplanetary File system). It is essentially, decentralized file storage. Another thing we are working on is decentralized authentication and decentralized identity. We want to give users total control of their identities. The server wouldn’t need to control anything about the user. From their browser, they can sign the things they send to the server or encrypt it without the server really having any idea of what is going on. I’m really working on the fun stuff, cutting edge. We take research really seriously. What we work on is not something that can be done half-heartedly. I even had to put the development of Gigamono on temporary hiatus.

Despite being on hiatus, I think Gigamono is the future of no code, and in part, serverless. But the thing is it’s too grand an idea to take on as a broke person. With that said, there are parts of it that I still make out time to develop - the web assembly runtime. Gartner, the analytic company, forecast that by 2027, 67 percent of software would be built by nontechnical developers. So, I have no doubt that in the near future the no-code development space will blow past its “twitter bubble”.

My plan with Rust is to get into decentralized identity, I have to say Web3 is really fascinating. I would also be looking at Zero-knowledge-proof. I might not actively participate in it, but I will definitely be keeping my eyes on it. On the low-level side of things, I want to build a programming Language - Racoon to be used in conjunction with my Web assembly runtime. Far into the future, I am going to be deeply involved in no-code AI. I’ve always loved doing low level things, that’s what made web assembly attractive to me, and in recent times because of how much power it gives you when you go low level, Rust. In the near future, most of my projects will be in Rust, and maybe Racoon. The journey so far has really been fun and I'm really excited for the things to come!

This story is based on [Appcypher's](https://github.com/appcypher) experience with Rust.