All the Rust Tutorials

TL;DR I made a website (webpage) of all the previous This Week in Rust walkthroughs https://tutorials.rustmanchester.co.uk/external-learning/ and I would love help making the page more useful, see #Call for participation

The idea

One night I had the idea to catalogue all the Rust tutorials I could find and make one of those awesome list pages, both to increase awareness of Rust Manchester and to have a place to direct people when they were asking for things to learn at our events.

Searching

At the moment I think clicking "show all tutorials" and ctrl+f the website is the best search, but I have started making a more robust search and as the webpage grows it will improve

For searching there are 3 parts:

1. Search if text exists in the title/summery. At the moment this is a case-insensitive exact search, I hope to make it fuzzy soon
2. Format filter, all cataloged resources have a format type like; Blog, video, ...
3. Tag filter, I have started assigning various hierarchical tags to each resource

Formats originally was fairly straightforwards thinking each tutorial will only be one format, but I started to come across videos that also had the same content in a blog, or recorded talks that were born from blogs or had transcripts, giving rise to something like the following :D

Technical

To kick-start the list I grabbed all the previous walkthroughs in This Week in Rust, then got to categorising & tagging them. Originally started with markdown converted to html with Zola on Rust Manchester's main website. I got through cataloging about 100 before I realised this was untenable! So I moved it to a subdomain/separate repo, soon after I also moved away from Zola and wrote a huge json that is parsed with some JavaScript then saved to the browser local storage (indexedDB) for better search performance and to keep the site static (for the free hosting).

Overall I'm happy with the current page and a happy accident of all the data being in JSON is you are able to curl and query it using JQ on the command line (if you don't like the look/feel of the website) curl https://gitlab.com/rust-manchester/website-external-learning/-/raw/master/tutorials.json | jq .

Call for participation

To date I have got through cataloging 162 of ~2000 and have quickly realised why nobody has done this before^[1] :D

Which gets to the point of this article, I need help!

• With the content
  • Help categorising, anything after 162 in this JSON
  • Help defining the categories, for easier categorising. I started in the README, but it just looks like a wall of text not very quick/easy to parse (also horribly written, sorry)
  • Help consolidating, there are a lot of blog series ( one subject being taught over multiple blogs ) that are currently shown as separate items but should be 1
  • Feedback, good or bad! I have no idea if what I've done is useful, I know I've found some use out of it and a few of my friends have, but I don't know if it's something the community would want, or heck if there is something similar that exists that I could put my effort into
  • Probably some help documenting how to do all the above :/ I tried my best with the README, but I suspect I missed a lot of things
  • Submitting your learning resources! If you've made a thing to help teach rust I'd love to add it to this list
• With the site, these I made gitlab issues for
  • Improve the search, this really encompass a lot of possible changes
    • Real time updating of the list instead of requiring the page to reload issue #5
    • have some and/or/not logic, so you can better narrow a search issue #7
    • Clicking tags could auto update the search in some way issue #6
    • give a date range for search issue #8
  • Clicking crate tags could jump you to the official crates.io page (realise this is in conflict with one of my search ideas) issue#14
  • Sorting issue #9
    • probably by date
  • Error handing - I'm sorry I basically did none :/ js is very forgiving... until it's not
    • Handle failed saves to the indexedDB issue #11
    • handle failed downloads of the JSONL files issue #10
      • have some retry mechanism for these
  • Improve editing issue #12
    • a way to click from website to the item in the huge json, for easy editing
    • a forum to fill out that could generate a diff, or at the start an email

Again all of the above is very open to interpretation changes! Please open issues for any ideas you have or even email me if you don't have Gitlab sean@seanborg.tech

Other stuff

Daily tutorials

Chatting about the webpage with Rory and Kiran they came up with the idea of daily tutorials as a way to have a common tutorial to discuss between other Rustaceans on the Rust Manchester discord, this also gave an easy tutorial to go to when you're not looking for something specific. I thought it was a great idea, so it's right at the top of the page :D also for permalinks there is an archive page!

Link checking

To attempt to keep the links relevant I am using Lychee however with over 2000 links I found there are a lot of transient problems... To mitigate this issue the CI now caches the result of daily link checks and only errors if the link failed for 7 days in a row, which still kicks out a lot of errors I need to address >300

1. I have no idea if anyone has done this before, I went looking but no luck, if someone has done this before please let me know as it would be a lot better to consolidate this in one place than have 2 places :D ↩