I started with rust 2 years back. It has been amazing since. Just build stuff you want to use, even recreate simple apps that you use everyday and have a rough idea on how they work. Getting used to the borrow checker takes time so don’t do something massive. Also if you haven’t finished the rust book and rustlings, I highly recommend them. They are amazing materials.
You can check out my github for ideas. I have till now as far as I can remember built a notification daemon, an automatic music player, a time management app, a video server, video library manager, a C/C++ build system and lots of other stuff. Reading other people’s code will make you get best practices.
PS Don’t learn from my builder_cpp project. The code is utter garbage, but it was how I used to do stuff in the early days
Cudos for you to start learning something new. But I have a small opinion.
I wouldn’t recommend rust to be the first systems language to learn. I would recommend you learn C, spend 3 months with it, ie write 3-5 small projects projects and one big project and then switch to rust.
My rationale is, since you haven’t had to deal with memory management before (I am assuming you have worked with scripting languages like javascript, python, lua, etc.) some things you need to do in rust might seem weird or might make no sense. Hence my recommendation on learning C.
When you get a bunch of segfaults, bust out the debugger, pull your head out trying to find an invalid pointer or a memory leak, then you will find rust like a breath of fresh air. In fact C is by far wayyyyyyy easier a language than rust and it will get your mindset right about memory ownership.
But I may be wrong, you do what you want to do. Best of luck in both cases either way.