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Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

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Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#12
post #5

Lucky you! If I were in your position I'd use a couple of months to do some Swift development, and a couple to do some Android development using Android Studio. Might be worth trying out something for Google Glass and/or Oculus Rift if you have the necessary hardware. Or maybe grab a programmable quadcopter and give that a go? Don't forget to consider learning about some other disciplines too, never know where things…

I will surely look into other things too. I have found myself getting more and more into health, nutrition, yoga and meditation the last years. So the dream would be to somehow combine it.

Well, if you keep at all of it then hopefully you'll stumble onto an idea where you can combine it all. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#13

No matter which one of these you choose, I'd recommend working on real (preferably open source) projects and putting them on Github so that you have something to show when you apply for jobs after 10 months.

Totally agreed! A recruiter I spoke to yesterday said, "I see that you have a presence on GitHub..." referring to one of my more popular OS projects, and then rambled on for about 15 minutes about his open source friendly client. I'm not saying you want to attract lots of rambling recruiters (because that's boring) but it means that people are recognising hard work and OS contributions as a good thing. It helps.

I will definitely try to work on my GitHub presence. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#16
It looks like the thing that's going to really blow up soon is IoT (or, at the very least, it looks like it's going to be the most lucrative, un-sexy-sounding thing on the planet in 5-10 years). If you have a good grounding in C, familiarize yourself with contiki (which, although it's not being used now, is likely to become the backbone of any third-party IoT node that isn't running linux) and some basic digital electronics.

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#18

The rest of the stack. Spend some time with layers 3&4 and you won't regret it. It was the most boring class I has in school and I use it every day. Read this book: http://goo.gl/ZGifKa (Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol.1: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture (4th Edition)). Knowing how TCP/IP works will give you an edge over other devs for understanding data movement and endear you to the IT/network/security folks…

There is 6th edition too: http://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-Volume-One-Edition...
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