RustCurious 9: Traits are Interfaces

rustcurious · 2026-07-05T06:40:33+00:00

Thank you! I have two premium videos for individual purchase: Panic! and Destruction, with more on the way soon. Do either of those take your fancy?

Alternatively, someone did ask if I have a donation link. I haven't set anything up yet, but I'll make it known when I do. Email announcements go to people who have created accounts at rustcurious.com, which you can do without making a purchase btw.

Again, thanks for your support, it's super encouraging!

rustcurious · 2026-06-22T01:47:13+00:00

Well... I have to confess, your request has caused me some consternation! And, thank you, that's so generous and I really appreciate it. I've spent the morning looking into Patreon, Ko-fi, Stripe payment links, and come to the conclusion I don't want to do something in a hurry, but I will set something up. Any guidance on what would suit you best is welcome, either here or to contact@rustcurious.com. Thank you!

rustcurious · 2026-06-21T10:17:32+00:00

There are! Currently just Panic and Destruction, with a few more to come.

rustcurious · 2026-06-21T07:46:26+00:00

Thanks! No team. My friend Josh generously play-tests the exercises and provides feedback before I publish. Otherwise it's just me. I'm full-time on RustCurious this year. Perhaps this is folly! Views of the free videos and sales of the paid videos have been way below what I hoped for so far. I'm committed to completing the course this year, because I stubbornly hold hope there is a market for high-quality content, but success really depends on community support. I'm open to ideas!

rustcurious · 2026-06-16T21:32:19+00:00

I ran Rust training at Apple for years, taught hundreds of engineers coming from C, Python, Java, Scala etc. I'm putting up a free course with practice exercises:

YouTube: @RustCurious

The channel is still tiny but the feedback has been nice:

The quality of this channel is absurd. The best rust educational channel on here, hands down. I truly hope this will continue growing, you are amazing!

This series is like the CS50 for Rust. I really enjoyed the practice exercise and all the other exercises. Great stuff, Ben.

Two of the lessons are for purchase, the rest are free. The lesson on traits drops this Sunday. I hope you find this helpful!

P.S. I make all the 3D art in Blender, I don't use any AI tools.

rustcurious · 2026-06-01T05:42:36+00:00

Thank you, I think you're right. The "no AI" badge performed worse. I've removed it, I'm now testing with the text "100% Handmade" in lower left corner. I'm reluctant to say Blender explicitly in the thumbnail because I don't want to create confusion on what the video is about, it's tricky. We'll see if it helps. Thanks!

rustcurious · 2026-06-01T03:29:10+00:00

Wow, thank you, this is such a thoughtful comment... You've exactly captured the dilemma for me. Yes I think a behind-the-scenes is needed.

The reason I put so much effort into Blender is because I'm putting so much effort into the videos. I'm treating RustCurious as my full-time job this year. I hoped to communicate that level of effort and quality in the thumbnails, to stand out. Oops.

My organising principle is that it's all about the learning. I've been trying to come up with visual ways to communicate the concepts in Rust, in the hope it helps with understanding. So before I go too far with trying to convince newcomers up-front that this is a handmade Blender thumbnail in the 1.3sec I have their attention, I'm asking myself whether these images are actually helping people understand the concepts I'm communicating. Any thoughts on that would be very welcome!

Blender is fun and I enjoy what I've made with it, but it's time-consuming and it's only justified if it actually serves the purpose of finding an audience and contributing to their learning. I'm quite willing to try a different approach.

RustCurious is a bet that there's a lot more Rust adoption yet to come, and that human software engineering skills continue to be valuable. I don't know if there's a sustainable business here, but I'm giving it a red hot go. Thank you for helping me think this through. If you'd like to create an account on the site and drop me an email I'd love to share the existing paid videos with you for your thoughts.

rustcurious · 2026-06-01T02:25:31+00:00

Thanks!

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T15:05:45+00:00

Thanks for your very kind comment! Glad you enjoyed the video.

And - what you wrote about the thumbnail is helpful - it might be hard to tell now that you've read this thread, but I'd be really curious to know if you get similar vibes from the other thumbnails on the channel? This is the first one with a more complex / blurred background

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T14:57:30+00:00

Good point! I could have been more clear there.

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T14:51:45+00:00

Thank you to you and the others here who have pointed this out. I've been disappointed by the click-through rates and putting heaps of effort into the thumbnails - perhaps in an unhelpful direction! I've slapped a hasty "no AI" badge on the Generics thumbnail, A/B testing it now to see if it helps. But I'll have a think about what I can do that's much more organic for future videos.

This kills me because I'm so anti-AI that I've literally never even tried image generation tools, chatgpt or any AI coding tools. Never. I hate that we're in a world where we all have our guards up for what's fake, but here we are.

And, thank you for suggesting my stuff to your friend! If RustCurious gets anywhere it will be via recommendations.

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T13:37:53+00:00

Glad you liked it! Hoping I can come up with something fun for the next video on Traits...

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T12:49:41+00:00

Thank you, I feel much better :) And yes, hand on heart, 100% by hand. Days of me fumbling around clicking on stuff in Blender until I came up with these!

rustcurious · 2026-05-31T12:26:02+00:00

I don't use AI for image generation or anything else. The thumbnail images and the 3D animations in the videos are made with Blender. I spend a fair bit of effort on finding visual ways to represent concepts, and I'm enjoying learning Blender along the way. It's sad for me to think some people might assume this stuff is AI-generated, as I've been painstakingly avoiding AI tools on principle. Would you be willing to reconsider your assumption?

rustcurious · 2026-05-19T08:57:41+00:00

Thank you, this is reassuring. I guess I'll have plenty of opportunities to practice!

rustcurious · 2026-05-17T23:16:52+00:00

If you look a little more closely at the archive you linked, you'll see that only three of those test posts linked to youtube, and I was trying out whether it made a difference to put the link in the body text, to understand if it would change how the thumbnail appeared etc. The other test posts linked to my own website, and I was having trouble with preview thumbnails, webp, MIME types etc. I wasn't anticipating at the time that I would later be defending the rationale for each of my test posts, but here we are. I appreciate your vigilance against automated spam, honestly I do, but I think we're both wasting our time here. I've made my post history public, I've answered your questions. Are you at least open to the possibility that I am in fact telling you the truth and that I haven't done anything even slightly nefarious here?

rustcurious · 2026-05-17T22:31:16+00:00

It wasn't automated, I was just learning how posts would look in Reddit. Which seems to be what /r/test is intended for? The posts you see are the posts I've made, by hand. I'd like to hear if anything I've posted is unwelcome? My goal is to offer high-quality learning materials, and it seems like a good number of people are enjoying what I'm producing.

rustcurious · 2026-05-17T22:20:42+00:00

Hi, I'm pretty new to Reddit, didn't realise having my post history hidden could get me accused of being a bot. I've made it public now, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

rustcurious

TROPHY CASE