Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#1

Post by eli5 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 12:53 AM UTC

I have, what I hope, an unusual and possibly beneficial question for anyone here and, hopefully, I can get as many different answers as possible.

I was wondering, what interesting technology, language or tool can I learn in a week or so by reading a book and/or practicing. Something that has a potential to greatly improve my productivity or maybe just my understanding of how things work, or maybe even my life. Anything.

To give you a number of subjects I'm already familiar with, so you don't suggest them: Rails, Javascript, html/css (you can imagine the stack), also quite good with Linux and its tools, using Vim.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#2

Post by lettergram » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 12:56 AM UTC

Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office.

You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand from the keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#3

Post by dclara » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 12:59 AM UTC

Currently, I'm running a free summer camp online to help college students to learn the professional skills as a software engineer according to the industrial standard.

There are various options you can pick and choose to be hands-on. The "main dishes" is to help you run through a process from installation, configuration and deploy a real world web application with the full server stack.

Check it out if you have time. It is described in a Kickstarter project: "How to build a website like an engineer" http://kck.st/SY4CXv.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#4

Post by eli5 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 1:01 AM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #2

Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office. You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand from the keyboard.

You do realize I listed Vim as one of the things I'm familiar with?

On a serious note, maybe I should learn Emacs at some point. Just to be sure I'm still in love with Vim.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#5

Post by lettergram » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 1:07 AM UTC

eli5 wrote: post #4

lettergram wrote: post #2

Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office. You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand from the keyboard.

You do realize I listed Vim as one of the things I'm familiar with? On a serious note, maybe I should learn Emacs at some point. Just to be sure I'm still in love with Vim.

I used Vim previously, I went through a month of Vim and a month of Emacs. I settled on Emacs in part because I enjoyed writing in Elisp

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#6

Post by logn » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 4:46 AM UTC

Regular expressions. If you want an in-depth book try Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl. Or for a quick guide, http://regular-expressions.info along with http://rubular.com/

Regex will not only give you new skills for programming (no more splitting strings in weird ways and doing complex indexOf/substr operations), it will help you day-to-day in rummaging through file systems and your code.

And if you already know regex, then I'd recommend Map Reduce Streaming. The Streaming variety is all based on standard in/out and very straight forward. Amazaon Elastic Map-Reduce could be a nice way to test things.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#7

Post by axit » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 6:50 AM UTC

Faster touch typing? If you're not already great at this you can improve productivity by improving your typing speed.

You can learn and practice on sites like http://ratatype.com/ and http://typeracer.com/

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#8

Post by adam-_- » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 8:50 AM UTC

Cooking.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#9

Post by ScottWhigham » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 10:44 AM UTC

Without more info about what your work or life are about, it's hard to suggest something too specific. Since we're being generic, I'd say that it's hard to beat the value of learning how relational databases work. Focus on learning the basics of SELECT - that takes months but you can get the rudimentary parts down in a week. If you already know the basics, then look into index design. Why/when/how and all that.

Re: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

#10

Post by eli5 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 11:22 AM UTC

logn wrote: post #6

Regular expressions. If you want an in-depth book try Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl. Or for a quick guide, http://regular-expressions.info along with http://rubular.com/ Regex will not only give you new skills for programming (no more splitting strings in weird ways and doing complex indexOf/substr operations), it will help you day-to-day in rummaging through file systems and your code. And if you already k…

Ahh, already read it long long time ago. Great advice though!