Thank you @Lynette and @KilianSolutions for sharing.My journey has been quite similar. I actually started with Solidity, but very quickly realized that the cryptography concepts I was exploring needed a language that offered more control, safety, and precision. That is what pushed me to learn Rust. And once I got comfortable with it, I completely fell in love with the language; the compiler, the guarantees, the patterns, everything.
That path eventually led me into PBA-X and later PBA7, where I finally got deep exposure to the Polkadot SDK. Because I had already written some ink!, moving between smart contracts and runtime development felt surprisingly natural. The alignment in macros, storage patterns, and idioms really makes the learning curve smoother.
Since then I have been experimenting a lot, including building iVF, and the more I build, the more convinced I am that Rust based smart contracts are one of Polkadot’s biggest strengths, especially for cryptography heavy or privacy preserving applications.
I also want to highlight how good the developer support around ink! has been. As I experiment and go through the documentation, I have found that raising issues and getting clarity or fixes is straightforward. It feels like a language the community, myself included, is genuinely excited to work with for all the right reasons.