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Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#11

Post by patio11 »

ramanujan wrote: post #9

At the risk of being downvoted, I'd say to look at other stacks besides MS (esp. Linux, OS X, Iphone, Android). With the noted exception of Stackoverflow, most innovation in tech today does not involve MS.

A quick meta-tangent: "at the risk of being downvoted" adds little to the discussion in the best of times. "At the risk of being downvoted for criticizing Microsoft" adds little to the discussion and requires about as much courage as an American presidential candidate taking a principled stand strongly in favor of apple pie.

A good portion of the innovation taking place these days is on the web, and the stacks at issue aren't what the client is running ("a browser") nearly as much as they are how you generate the stuff you pass over to them. (I know browser incompatibilities are a headache -- a four-figure headache for me last month, actually -- but they're quickly becoming a headache that some ubermensch JS framework author suffers so that I don't have to.)

A portion of current innovation in tech is the web stack (notably absent from your list). A portion of it is associated technologies that may not interact with the customer directly ever, such as cloud stuff (anything from S3 to Azure to VPSes). A portion of that is taking the wealth of data/apps already available and reusing it in new and innovative ways. And a portion is process innovation, which has very little to do with your technology vendor of choice and a lot to do with how you use the tools you're using.

I have never done development dedicated to a MS platform (although my Swing apps and web apps are most commonly used on them), but I'm pretty sure you can write A/B tests in .NET.

I think you get this, because you cite StackOverflow. StackOverflow could be written in any of a dozen languages, in almost any web stack. It isn't innovative because of magic that it does on the server side -- it is innovative because of how they have incentivized a community to work for them via the karma/badge system, how they work the StackOverflow-is-an-executable-advertisement-for-StackExchange business model, etc etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#12

Post by ramanujan »

patio11 wrote: post #11
ramanujan wrote: post #9

At the risk of being downvoted, I'd say to look at other stacks besides MS (esp. Linux, OS X, Iphone, Android). With the noted exception of Stackoverflow, most innovation in tech today does not involve MS.

A quick meta-tangent: "at the risk of being downvoted" adds little to the discussion in the best of times. "At the risk of being downvoted for criticizing Microsoft" adds little to the discussion and requires about as much courage as an American presidential candidate taking a principled stand strongly in favor of apple pie. A good portion of the innovation taking place these days is on the web, and the stacks at iss…

:)

I know that MS bashing is de rigueur. So de rigueur, in fact, that many tend to downvote the most mindless variety of the genre to prevent from descending into proggit. Hence my little throat clearing.

As for whether the web stack is different from the OS -- of course it is to an extent, but the initial poster is proof positive that there is a strong correlation between low level platform and tools. I suppose it is possible to use Django and git and emacs on Windows, but it would not be pleasant unless I was using Cygwin, at which point you may as well use OS X or Linux.

Re: cloud and other components: come now, is there anyone in high performance computing still paying per node for closed source MS licenses? Is there anyone in HPC who wasn't using rsync before MS came out with their clone for "branch office" management? And what proportion of people using EC2 use Windows instances that are just not as easy to automate as their Linux counterparts?

These questions answer themselves. The hypothetical concept of platform equivalence is as academically valid and practically irrelevant as the Turing equivalence of Brainf@@k and Python. You are bending over too far backwards to be fair to Redmond :)

tl;dr = people working on the MS stack in 2009 tend to be behind in their thinking about tech. The next big thing will not be on Windows.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#13

Post by cesare »

omouse wrote: post #2

Don't. Learn the concepts and ideas behind the "technologies" and work with them instead. Then it just comes down to messing around with the details of implementation. This way, whatever happens to be "the way of the future" next will be easy enough to pick up (unless it's something absolutely horrid which no sane business should use). You aren't falling behind, don't worry.

I couldn't agree more.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#14

Post by lkozma »

ramanujan wrote: post #9

At the risk of being downvoted, I'd say to look at other stacks besides MS (esp. Linux, OS X, Iphone, Android). With the noted exception of Stackoverflow, most innovation in tech today does not involve MS.

Yeah, more generally the advice could be not to be so attached to any of the stacks, just know the stuff that doesn't change that much (algorithms, protocols, etc.) and get your stuff done with whichever tool is at hand.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#15

Post by WesleyJohnson »

omouse wrote: post #2

Don't. Learn the concepts and ideas behind the "technologies" and work with them instead. Then it just comes down to messing around with the details of implementation. This way, whatever happens to be "the way of the future" next will be easy enough to pick up (unless it's something absolutely horrid which no sane business should use). You aren't falling behind, don't worry.

You make a very good point and I appreciate the suggestion. I suppose getting caught up in the new and cutting edge is really less important than understanding those core concepts and ideas as you've mentioned. I suppose in some light I've already done this and just hadn't realized it. My last job was my first experience with the Microsoft Stack and I worried about picking things up quickly enough. However, even the limited experience I had with VB, PHP and MySQL had exposed me to enough general programming concepts that picking up ASP and SQL Server proved to be far less difficult than I had imagined. Thanks for reminding me of this.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#16

Post by WesleyJohnson »

patio11 wrote: post #5

There are two facets to this question: what you can do as WesleyJohnson and what you can do within your organization. Your motivation is making sure WesleyJohnson has a job four years from now. Your organization's motivation is selling more $FOO at lower costs. You need to start identifying or creating happy synergies which align your organization's motivations with your personal motivations in terms of career growth…

Another very good idea and something I hadn't thought of. As I mentioned, I'm only 1 week into the new job, but was given wind of a new project coming in that's going to require a classic ASP webapp to be migrated over to ASP.NET. This may be a great opportunity for me to do just what you've outlined.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#17

Post by WesleyJohnson »

jdale27 wrote: post #4

I was late to the game [...] What game? Newer technology isn't always better. It's just... newer. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something? [H]ow do you force yourself to step outside your comfort zone of doing things the way you know how and trying something new? If "step[ping] outs…

What game?

I suppose I was referring to the fact that I jumped on board with using the Microsoft Stack starting with classic ASP when they were well into ASP.NET 2.0. It was also a reference to the fact that I had one programming class in High School, never went to college and didn't get my first programming gig until I was 26.

What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something?

Very relevant question and something I hadn't paused to consider. At first thought, I'd say it's a little of both which tells me I should really take some time to evaluate that and go from there.

Thanks for your suggestion with Lisp as well. As someone else pointed out, it should be more about learning underlying concepts and ideas of programming and less about the language, framework or etc. I would imagine there are some great fundamentals I could learn by taking on a language like Lisp that, as you mentioned, would be well outside my comfort zone.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#18

Post by WesleyJohnson »

Tangurena wrote: post #6

A long time ago, I used to jump on every bandwagon that seemed interesting. That lead to lots of wasted time and effort with technological dead-ends. So I over-reacted and only bothered with technology that had been around a minimum of 2 years (or if a "for dummies" book on the subject came out). Some of our shipping products are based on VB6, while some of the others are .NET 3.5. Generally, if some new technology a…

Thanks for the link, I've added it to my bookmarks for stuff I wanted to review in the coming weeks and will definitely be checking it out.

I also see what you mean about being too quick to jump onto the bandwagon. I realize it's in debate right now, but there IS talk that Linq to SQL will be replaced by Linq to Entities. So with that (and the comments people are posting about learning the meat and not the seasoning), not diving into it a year ago when I first heard about it may not have been such a missed opportunity after all.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#19

Post by WesleyJohnson »

ramanujan wrote: post #9

At the risk of being downvoted, I'd say to look at other stacks besides MS (esp. Linux, OS X, Iphone, Android). With the noted exception of Stackoverflow, most innovation in tech today does not involve MS.

As several others have noted below, I need to take a step back and figure out if I'm wanting to be on the cutting edge because I'm really motivated to learn or if I'm more concerned with keeping up with the trends. I know that for the foreseeable future, I'll be working with the MS Stack as it's my means of living. Of course, if they stick with what works and don't deviate from the norm too much - it would be much easier for me to spend time to learning something like Lisp (as someone had mentioned) or digging into another platform or language as you've suggested.

I did sign up for the iPhone Dev Program and buy an iPod Touch at the same time the Dev Program launched, but stress at my previous job left little motivation for me to program in my free time. My dev license/subscription ran out and I sold my iPod a while back, but perhaps it's time to revisit it or the Android platform.

I definitely have some options and some stuff to think about. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with changing technologies?

#20

Post by wisty »

You just learnt interfaces? Those are in Java, C++, Python (2.6+) and any other OO language you care to mention.

I don't use C#, so I'm not sure what Linq is exactly, but it seems to be similar to an ORM with baked in transactions. Lots of languages have ORM layers, and they will have some similarities with Linq. If I recall correctly, Erlang does this quite nicely with it's database system.

Anyway, most of the techniques and pattens you learn will be widely applicable. Vendors will often claim that they are special (by cooking up new terms for old technologies), but it's usually just the same old features with a new sticker.

.Net looks like it's innovating because it's new, but it's mostly pretty conservative. The whole "cross language platform" thing is cool, but that's it.

Remember the lessons DCOM, COM+, and CORBA. Not all the new bandwagons are worth jumping on.

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