Binkedin: Trying to Make Sense of Rust
Vision
I was 19, super excited about this language called Rust, and just wanted to throw this framework called Axum into some project because it's hella fast and robust (as the whole world said it was). Not really bothered about the "why" behind the technicals, I started exploring what to build. I landed on making a LinkedIn clone.
Why a LinkedIn clone specifically?
There are way cooler sites to clone like Netflix, Google Meet, or at bare minimum Twitter, right?
Well, here's the thing: I kept hearing people say that LinkedIn helps you network faster and it's essential for employment. You need a great profile that gets recruiters excited. I had zero posts on there and had been wanting to make my first post for ages. If you know me personally, you know exactly where this was heading:
"How cool would it be if my very first LinkedIn post was about a clone of the platform itself?"
What I actually built
It was my first ever full-stack project, and in a language like Rust no less. The Rust part ended up being a couple hundred lines of non-scalable code. Looking back, the design was honestly awful. (19-year-old me would've never guessed I'd actually develop a taste for design. He absolutely hated designing.)
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Auth | ✓ |
| Posts | ✓ |
| Comments | ✓ |
| Followers | ✓ |
But here's what I really took away: it wasn't just the skill to write an application, but the confidence that I could do better. And now I'm one step closer to actually understanding how web applications are made.
I got my wish. That first LinkedIn post happened (I thought I was so cool for what I did back then), and honestly? I still think it's pretty sick. This is how my whole journey with web apps started.
Check out the project on GitHub.