“Knowledge is power.” – Francis Bacon

The chrono crate is the standard way to work with dates and times in Rust. It helps you parse, format, and perform arithmetic on dates and times, whether you are building logs, schedulers, or working with timestamps from APIs. I first used chrono when logging events in a CLI tool. I needed readable timestamps, but […]

In this mini-project, you will build a simple command-line application that fetches real-time weather data from a public API. You will use reqwest to make HTTP requests, serde to parse the JSON response, and clap to accept city names from the terminal. This is the kind of CLI I wish I had built earlier while

The serde crate is the standard for serializing and deserializing data in Rust. It allows you to convert Rust structs to JSON and back using powerful macros. Combined with serde_json, it gives you type-safe and flexible control over reading and writing structured data. I first used serde when building a CLI tool that needed to

The reqwest crate allows you to make HTTP requests in Rust with ease. You can perform GET, POST, and other HTTP methods, handle JSON responses, set headers, and deal with networking errors, all using an ergonomic API similar to popular libraries in other languages. When I first tried to call an API in Rust, I

Rust allows you to execute system commands through the std::process::Command API. You can spawn external programs, pass arguments, capture output, and handle errors, all using safe and structured code. One of the first CLI utilities I built in Rust needed to call an external tool installed on the system. I was worried it would require

Rust provides powerful and safe file input/output through the std::fs module. You can read from and write to files, create directories, iterate through folder contents, and handle file system errors, all with strong type safety and predictable behavior. When I first started working with files in Rust, I was surprised at how ergonomic and safe

The clap crate lets you build powerful, user-friendly command-line interfaces in Rust. You can define commands, arguments, flags, and help messages with minimal code. It supports auto-generated help, validation, and even subcommands, all following common CLI conventions. When I built my first Rust CLI, I manually used std::env::args, which worked for small tools but quickly

Cargo is Rust’s official package manager and build tool. It handles compiling your code, managing dependencies, running tests, generating docs, formatting code, and more. Learning a few advanced Cargo commands and features can make your development process smoother and more efficient. When I began working on larger Rust projects, I realized how powerful Cargo really

Rust provides structured logging through the log crate, a lightweight and flexible facade for application-wide logging. By pairing it with implementations like env_logger, you can log messages at different levels (error, warn, info, debug, trace) without needing to write custom logging systems. As my projects grew, using println! for debugging became unmanageable. I needed a

Integration testing in Rust involves placing test files in a dedicated tests/ directory outside your main code. These tests interact with your library or binary the way an external user would, and they are compiled as separate crates, giving you full isolation for end-to-end behaviour validation. After getting comfortable with unit testing, I needed a