Few things make me happier than taking a stroll in Brooklyn and crossing paths with someone I haven’t talked to in a long time. But living in a city of eight and half million people this serendipitous moment doesn’t happen nearly enough. Lately I’ve been wondering if I can recreate some of the magic of this experience using technology. In this series I’m going to show you how to build an application that let’s you place a phone call to a random friend whenever you want. It’s not exactly the same as crossing paths in Brooklyn but it will still be a fun way to connect with long lost buddies.

This series is also an excuse for me to learn a new programming language, Rust. Has Rust been on your list of languages to check out? Let’s learn together! In this first part of this series I’ll show you how to get started with Rust and the Iron web framework.

Hello, Rust!

I’ve been super surprised with how much fun I’ve had playing with Rust. Let me walk you through a quick “Hello World!” so you can see why I’m so excited.

Are you a Rust expert? As fun as writing “Hello, World!” is, I’m not offended if you wait for part 2 of this series to come out before you dive in.

The first step is to install Rust. I hope you’re not surprised! It only takes a few minutes. Don’t worry about me, I’ll just be reading fan theories about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. while we wait.

Now that you have Rust installed we can start building our first application. We’re going to build our application with the help of Cargo. Cargo is the package manager for Rust. It feels similar to working with npm in Node.JS or Composer in PHP. To create a new Rust project with Cargo jump into terminal, navigate to the folder where you’d like your application directory to live and run the following command: