From Chalk to Rust: Autobiography of a rustacean born from the shell of a History teacher

Luis Granja — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:38:49 +0000

This is the first article in a series where I document my transition, at age 40, from History Teacher with a Professional Master's in History Teaching, to a Software Engineer focused on Rust.

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

0. Prologue: The Age of Uncompiled Promises

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 a 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 own recollections.

However, I do remember some of my first "freak-outs", almost always related to technology.

The first one happened in 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 5 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.

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: a Pentium-100, with an incredible 8MB of RAM, a 1.2GB hard drive, a 3¼ floppy drive, and a 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 second 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 remember 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: while my 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—I 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 cafes 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 of commercial internet in Brazil around 1995, I started staying up all night connected to IRC chats, especially on the classic BrasNET network.

The high-pitched sound of the modem doing the handshake with the dial-up ISP opened the doors to a totally new world.

In the #emuroms channel, I came into deep contact with the emulation scene, especially for the SNES, one of my favorite consoles to this day. In that same channel, I talked for many, many hours with people who today I don't even know how they are or what their real names are. Overfl0w, alvs, fserve, GreenGoblin, Comic, Yoda, Ryu_1, Nightf4ller, IcemanX (and many others whose nicks or correct spellings I can't remember, so please forgive me from the bottom of my heart if your nick was part of this History and wasn't remembered here)—if any of you stumble upon this text, I was Gilgame[legionario], or sometimes Guardian`of`the`Blind... Some of you I ended up finding again through the eras of Orkut, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and today I finally know who you are.

It was in this environment that I started writing my first "Hello Worlds", mainly in C. There was always some good Samaritan among the regulars willing to teach programming to anyone willing to learn, and sometimes, I was the one willing to learn.

I even participated in ROM translation groups: we did what is now called Reverse Engineering and low-level data manipulation (hex editing). I worked especially on translating the SNES ROMs for Romance of the Three Kingdoms III and Tales of Phantasia—whose Japanese character compression gave us many headaches, until an international ROM translation group, Dejap, started a multi-language project, and I was among the translators for Portuguese.

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.

It was also on IRC that I started "playing with code," writing my first mIRC scripts. I developed fileservers, created small text minigames like "Dragon Ball Battles", programmed bots with random greeting messages, and automated access and user permission management (+v, +m, +op).

As the 20th century closed its curtains, with the shadows of the Y2K Bug threatening to bring down planes, wipe out entire financial systems, derail trains, and establish general chaos, I was experiencing digital life in a niche community, whose tentacles extended through telephone cables around the world. Without intentionality, without planning, and without theoretical backing, what I experienced was still Software Development as a living culture.

I was programming. I was building solutions. Without knowing it, I was already operating within a logic similar to modern Software Engineering: distributed collaboration, continuous iteration, and collective learning.

Long before distributed version control was packaged into user-friendly web interfaces or sponsored by corporate giants, the open-source ethos was already pulsing in the channels of BrasNET, in romhacking forums, and in the exchange of mIRC scripts.

The path between those late-night scripts and professional Software Engineering today, in 2026, would not be linear. It would pass through institutions, structures, and systems that, much like the legacy code I wrote myself, carried their own limitations, debts, and contradictions. This curve—long and unexpected—would pass through History. Literally.

I had the tools and the community, but I lacked the architecture. I was a kid writing scripts, discovering the internet which, in turn, was also discovering itself.

And then, the university entrance exams (vestibular) arrived, and the code was reallocated to a low-priority process, in a wait state—waiting for resources to be allocated.

DEV Community: Luis Granja

From Chalk to Rust: Autobiography of a rustacean born from the shell of a History teacher

0. Prologue: The Age of Uncompiled Promises