From Chalk to Rust: Autobiography of a rustacean born from the shell of a History teacher
Source: Dev.to
At 40 years old, I’m rebuilding my career from scratch—transitioning from a History teacher to a Software Engineer focused on Rust.
This isn’t a “learn to code in 6 months” story. It’s about legacy systems, technical debt (human and institutional), and a path that started long before I even knew what programming was.
This is where it begins.
A transition from Legacy Systems in Education to the “metal and rust” of the Rust programming language
I don’t remember many details from my early childhood. Several moments of that kid born in 1985, who grew up in the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil—recently freed from dictatorship—are lost to memory. They are only retrieved in conversations with my mother, uncles, and cousins. In fact, I believe a good part of these memories was built through continuous repetition—the pure essence of versioning via Oral History, where each family member made a new commit to the database of my own history, frequently fixing bugs in my recollections.
However, I do remember some of my first “freak‑outs”, almost always related to technology.
The first freak‑out (late 1991)
To understand that moment, you have to look at the back‑end of that era: in the early 90s, cancer was still a huge, incurable monster, whose diagnosis acted like the shadow of a sharp guillotine hovering over many families. In a country that was still taking its first steps in building the Unified Health System (SUS) as we know it today, oncological treatment was an endless drain on the family budget. My maternal grandmother was fighting the disease (she would pass away the following year, in 1992), and because of that, there was never enough money for Christmas.
It was then that my godfather, Uncle Edson, revolted by the sadness of the situation, decided to make use of one of the best things Brazil has to offer: he split the nephews’ Christmas presents into multiple installments. I got my first video‑game console: a Turbo Game (produced by CCE, a Brazilian hardware clone of the 8‑bit Nintendo NES, with two cartridge slots for both American and Japanese formats). I was so immensely surprised that I jumped with euphoria and almost hit my head on the balcony window at the house of my godmother, Aunt Mariana, where we were gathered for Christmas Eve dinner.
Over the following years, my mother, Terezinha, started fighting with me constantly to study, do my homework, do household chores, read a book, or do anything else to get away from the screen. It became practically an addiction. Admittedly, I never got good at any of the games I played, even as an adult and trying hard!
I also remember when this same Uncle Edson called us over to see the computer he had bought. I’m not exactly sure of the processor, but I believe it was a 486. From that day on, I started using school assignments as an excuse to go to his house. I would type the texts as fast as possible, and until late afternoon I’d try to spend hours playing Full Throttle or exploring the LucasArts Archives – Vol. 1 (a box with five wonderful CDs that included The Dig, Sam & Max – Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis). With a mini‑dictionary next to the keyboard, I played and learned English at the same time, solving the logical puzzles of those games.
It was my first prolonged contact with computers.
This initial fascination lasted until I was 12, when my mother managed to make a considerable upgrade to our home infrastructure.
The second freak‑out (age 12)
We went together (me, my mom, and Uncle Edson) on a quick day trip to the border of Ponta Porã and Pedro Juan Caballero, in Paraguay—a relatively common trip for some people from Mato Grosso do Sul. We picked the parts the budget allowed:
- Pentium‑100
- 8 MB RAM (incredible for the time)
- 1.2 GB hard drive
- 3¼ in. floppy drive
- CD‑ROM reader
Cutting‑edge technology for the time! It was a successful deploy: the rainy night allowed us to pass through the customs checkpoints without being stopped. Rain on the road, usually rejected, has always been a great ally of the sul‑mato‑grossense smugglers (muambeiros).
Thus began my second freak‑out. I don’t think it has ended to this day. This time I wasn’t under a window, so I didn’t take as many risks.
My cousin Fábio and I put this computer together as fast as possible and spent the entire night and early morning testing the games that came with it. Interestingly, I remember the LucasArts point‑and‑clicks in much more detail than the ones bundled with that computer. I recall there was a soccer one, a fighting one, but the exact titles escape my memory.
This early contact with home computers—rare in 1990s Brazil—besides being a circumstantial privilege largely bounded by class, race, and access, was also a symptom of a silent transformation: the emergence of a generation that would learn to use technology even before understanding it.
The family divide over that machine (and the subsequent ones we had in the following years) was clear:
- Mother: used the computer for research, lesson planning, entering grades, and writing her Master’s thesis—fighting with the machine to learn how to be a “user of this piece of junk” (in her own words), always asking for my help and guidance.
- Me: wanted to master creation. To understand how to build what ran there, what solutions could be developed, how to keep everything running smoothly, for a long time.
I played exhaustively at home, and when I wasn’t there, I spent my time on the display machines at the extinct Mesbla store or Belgo Informática at Shopping Campo Grande; in cyber cafés or, later, in LAN‑houses. But soon, games alone wouldn’t be enough.
How a bunch of strangers on IRC taught me that programming was an act of community
With the popularization …
(The remainder of the article continues here.)
My Early Days in the Brazilian IRC Scene (circa 1995‑2000)
The commercial internet in Brazil was just taking off around 1995. I spent countless nights glued to my modem, listening to the high‑pitched handshake that opened the doors to a totally new world.
The #emuroms Channel
In the classic BrasNET network I discovered the #emuroms channel, where I fell deep into the emulation scene—especially for the SNES, a console I still love today. I talked for many, many hours with people whose real names I still don’t know:
Overfl0walvsfserveGreenGoblinComicYodaRyu_1Nightf4llerIcemanX- (and many others whose nicknames or spellings I can’t recall—please forgive me if you’re missing)
If any of you stumble upon this text, know that I was Gilgame[legionario], sometimes Guardianofthe`Blind. Over the years I re‑connected with some of you through Orkut, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and finally learned who you really are.
First “Hello World” Programs
In that environment I wrote my first Hello World programs, mainly in C. There was always a good‑samaritan among the regulars willing to teach anyone eager to learn—sometimes I was the student, sometimes the teacher.
ROM Translation & Reverse Engineering
I also joined ROM‑translation groups, doing what we now call reverse engineering and low‑level data manipulation (hex editing). My main projects were:
- Translating the SNES ROM for Romance of the Three Kingdoms III
- Translating Tales of Phantasia (the Japanese character compression gave us many headaches)
When the international ROM‑translation group Dejap started a multi‑language project, I became one of the Portuguese translators.
We operated in an era when video‑game publishers didn’t even care about internationalization (i18n) for the Brazilian market. This distributed, anonymous, passion‑driven, and purely collaborative community was, in practice, the first open‑source development ecosystem I knew—long before GitHub existed.
mIRC Scripting Adventures
IRC was also where I began “playing with code” by writing my first mIRC scripts:
- Simple file servers
- Small text minigames (e.g., “Dragon Ball Battles”)
- Bots that sent random greeting messages
- Automated access and user‑permission management (
+v,+m,+op)
From Hobbyist Scripts to Professional Engineering
As the 20th century closed its curtains—amid Y2K fears of planes crashing, financial systems collapsing, and trains derailing—I was living a digital life in a niche community whose tentacles stretched through telephone cables worldwide.
Without any formal intent, planning, or theoretical backing, what I experienced was software development as a living culture:
- Distributed collaboration
- Continuous iteration
- Collective learning
Long before distributed version control became user‑friendly web interfaces sponsored by corporate giants, the open‑source ethos pulsed through BrasNET channels, rom‑hacking forums, and the exchange of mIRC scripts.
The Road Ahead
The path from those late‑night scripts to professional software engineering in 2026 has not been linear. It has passed through institutions, structures, and systems that—much like the legacy code I wrote—carry their own limitations, debts, and contradictions. This long, unexpected curve has literally passed through History.
I had the tools and the community, but I lacked the architecture. I was a kid writing scripts, discovering an internet that was, in turn, discovering itself.
Then the university entrance exams (vestibular) arrived, and the code was reallocated to a low‑priority process, placed in a wait state—waiting for resources to be allocated.