2024 *
What a journey it has been on this project :)
Mar *
It all started after a rough period in my life when I needed a change and something new and decided to learn Rust. I must say that in the first months, I felt like a student again when I learned all those new programming languages and concepts by myself. I was very curious, and my brain was like a sponge absorbing all this new information and learning all these new things. It was great, beautiful, and a new beginning, one of which I was really in need of.
I needed a learning project to keep me motivated, so I built an encrypted filesystem, thinking it would be a great learning experience. And what an experience it was, indeed :)
Mar 25
At first, I started with an in-memory filesystem to learn FUSE and Rust concepts.
Then, I moved to this project. First name was encrypted_fs, it has 15,127 downloads :)
Apr 5
The first commit is the beginning of something interesting :). 11 files changed, +2608 -0 lines changed.
It is a pleasure looking back at the basic implementation of the encrypted fs logic and FUSE wrapper and how much it has evolved since then :)
June *
At some point, I wanted to do more with this project and not limit it to just a learning project. I was thinking about monetizing it, but I realized there’s a lot of work to be done for that, and I can’t do all that alone. I was thinking of hiring some freelancers, but I don’t make money from the project, so it’s not sustainable.
Then, I posted on some Rust communities saying, “Look, I have this interesting FOSS project. Do you want to contribute to OSS?” Many responded, joined, and started pushing code, and PRs came. It was beautiful.
Not only did they come, but they stayed and continued contributing. We also extended our collaboration to other projects.
I really appreciate all of you, and I’m honored to be part of such a community with great, intelligent, curious, open-minded, always willing to learn, and hardworking people. Thank you all for all that you are doing.
Sep *
Razvan, Associate Professor at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, contacted me to say that they are organizing OmniOpenCon to motivate students to get into development.
He found me on committers.top telling me I’m the 5th most active GitHub user in Romania (6th now). I was shocked :)
3500+ commits and 4000+ contributions in about 6 months, all these on rencfs. The ones above were working with web tech, so that means I’m #1 for Rust in Romania :)
While working on this project, I learned a lot about cryptography, filesystems, Rust, building clean code, and a lot more, and decided to do my part in giving something back to the community by writing several articles, small ones too, holding talks and presentation and I enjoyed it. Online and community presence.
Nov 16
After I gave the talk at OmniOpenCon, Razvan told me he organizes courses where students are given tasks from open-source projects to initiate them into programming. He asked me if I wanted to provide them with some good first issues from rencfs, which I accepted.
This is how the #cdl-courses channel was born. For several weeks, 13 students tackled the mysteries of Rust, cryptography, and filesystems. It was an interesting experience for me, and I hope it was for them, too. I hope they learned much and developed valuable skills for their next journey in this beautiful universe.
You can see their contributions. After we test them a bit more, they will be merged into the main branch.
Thank you to all of you CDL course students. I hope to see you again soon.
Oct 28
To motivate people, I decided to organize weekly coding challenges. In these challenges, we learn various computing concepts and implement interesting concepts. We also learn more about algorithms, data structures, programming languages, and how to perform complex tasks.
Dec *
Rust is not an easy language to learn. Learning it was difficult for me, too, although I had more than 20 years of experience in tech, working with several programming languages. I learned it by myself. I have to admit there were also hard moments, and a few times, I thought I was not a good enough developer for Rust and thought to give up. I would have appreciated having someone by my side back then to motivate, encourage, and tell me to continue the journey so that, in time, the dots would connect, and all these hard times would only make me more resilient and a better programmer.
So I decided to be the mentor I didn’t have for others in those Rust’s valleys and help them continue the journey, ensuring they would all get better and have the greatest adventure of their lives.
I can now confidently say that learning Rust was the best decision of my life on all levels. It changed my life, making me a better developer, mentor, human being, and advocate of Open Source.
This is how the teaching journey began. On February 3, we started several courses, such as Rust for Beginners, Blockchain, and the QA manual. More are on the way.
I hope this will help others to be the best they can be.
Dec 31
We got to the present moment. There are some stats of the repo.
1427 commits
18 contributors
29 people have access to this repository
22 outside collaborators
Issues
- 96 open
- 44 closed
milestone: 1.0.0-rc1: the first stable release we are working on
- 39 open
- 12 closed
Slack: 67 members in the rencfs community
Conclusion
It all started as a learning experience for Rust. It evolved into something more, and others learned from it, too. It is soon to become a stable product used in real-use cases.
As a new year resolution, I wish this project, and all others of xorio community, to become essential contributors to security, privacy, tech, and well-being, helping people learn and experiment with new tech and build interesting solutions and why now have them teach and give back to the OSS community too.
Thank you all for being part of this community and for all you do for it and the project. Let’s keep the adventure going by learning and building great products.
I wish you all a Happy New Year, health and happiness, and a great journey ahead in this beautiful universe, simulation, or creation — whatever it is, it’s special and maybe unique.
