Shounak Das
It was a nice Sunday afternoon when I realized that my mid-semester exams are starting from this Friday. So, I decided to start studying, and fired up Google Classroom on the good old Firefox. As always, I was signed out of my college Gmail account (they do this every 15 minutes or so). After 3 or 4 attempts, I was able to guess the password. Then I spent the next 10 minutes trying to decide which subject to pick, as usual.
After much struggle, I chose Operating Systems. I like the subject, as long as I don’t have to study it for the exams. Today, I started with process synchronization — critical section, producer-consumer problems and all those stuffs. Whenever I study something new, I always try to visualize stuff and try out things on my own. I like to see the results myself rather than reading the books. It’s always easier to understand and remember things when you try it yourself, especially if you have a weak memory like me (or a weak urge to memorize, I don’t know which one I have, honestly).
So there I was, trying to understand Peterson’s solution. As usual, my brain ordered me to open ChatGPT in a new tab and look up for a code to demonstrate this algorithm. ChatGPT spit out some 10 lines of Python code. Et voilà! My miserable brain was able to interpret the algorithm. Now was the time to write the code on my own, and tweak with it. But, since I am learning Rust at the moment, I thought how about I rewrite the Python code in Rust and see how it goes. It would be a good beginner project, wouldn’t it? Just when I was about to create the new rust project, another nice idea struck my mind. I created a GitHub repo where I will put all my rust projects. So I created a new local directory, where I would copy all the main.rs from different projects and rename them. This is where the 3 long hours started. Copying a file to a new location, then cd-ing into that location, and then renaming the file using mv is a long process. And I do not want to repeat the same steps every time. The solution? I decided to make a command-line tool in rust.
It’s an easy job, but the only problem is that I don’t know rust that well. So, I had to read the docs thoroughly to get an idea of how to do it. All this doc-reading took me more than 3 hours, and I am yet to start building the actual thing! XD
Well, that’s it for today. I will write another article on how I made the tool in a day or two. Over and out.
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