Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

news.ycombinator.com

121–130 of 441 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#121

Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…

It can be incredibly fun to learn new tech for those of us who aren't purely trying to maximize output.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#122

Mathematics. Its Probably just another fad that will prove worthless next year, but I'm jumping on the band wagon for now.

>Probably just another fad that will prove worthless next year

Sorry, my humor detector is a little out of tune this morning. This is sarcasm right?

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#123

Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…

It's a bit strange to me that you use profitability as your metric of success for a _side project_.

Most of the shiny tech that has severe breaking changes is Javascript - there are plenty of other technologies to have fun with.

The older I get the less I care about the technology choice and the more I care about the content of the project.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#124

Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…

The irony of this post is saying you don't want to learn new and then saying you used parcel.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#125
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any apps running in production that's using LiveView?

I have a very backend (like, orchestrating customer vms) admin panel running in prod with liveview. the elixir backend replaced a flawed stateless django program and has been error-free since we kicked it over a few months ago. Mind you the scale isn't big (we have 10 or so customers at any given time) and will be hiring a junior to build a user facing liveview. I'm confident that elixir is footgun-proof enough to do…

Nice.

Do you still feel that way even with the new features of LV being developed? It feels like how you use it is being heavily churned on with the introduction of Live Components and now people are also building custom unofficial abstractions on top of that. But at the same time, end user features don't seem to be being released that often.

IMO it's starting to feel like Phoenix is becoming very fragmented even though it's already a small community. You have people not using Live View, some people using Live View, other people using Live View Components and others trying to build their own custom take on what a LV component is. Combined with the documentation being pretty sparse on LV in general makes it pretty non-friendly to develop with and a lot of the articles you read online don't apply to "Phoenix". The apply to whatever variant of no LV vs LV vs LV components vs LV custom component library style you use.

It reminds me of the Node days when tj stopped working with Node and a million other libraries and styles started to spring up to become an alternative to Express. It took years for that to settle down and it's still pretty fragmented.

But a lot of folks just want to go heads down and write cool applications. I really do like Phoenix but yeah, since the introduction of LV and watching its development pace for the last year+, I'm getting kind of uneasy with how things are unfolding.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#126
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here; even throwaways get built on Django. It's just so quick and easy to test something out. And if you're lucky and it does need to scale… Django can scale just fine for the vast majority of things. It Just Works™ and the Django group is not trying to steer Django into something that it's not. Same with Flask.

Why Django over something like rails? If you going to go for batteries included go for a Tesla battery pack and not a set of double a Duracells. I like using flask but django always felt half baked to me vs rails.

Django if you are already extremely comfortable with python would be my guess.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#127
post #76

Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL. Not knowing of their capabilities may lead you to unnecessarily complicating your tech stack. You can go a really long way with just this domain of expertise. From there, do the same with whatever key-value store interests you (for me, it's Redis). Python isn't known for high performance but when a django web app uses a cache and relati…

I'd start with CMU's "Intro to Database Systems", their lectures are on youtube. Highly recommended both for the depth and how Andy Pavlo presents the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeYBdghaIjc&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#128
post #6

If you're in the web sector, definitely give a try to wasm. Have a go at Rust while you're at it — see what I did there? I'm personally hot for GraphQL because it's a powerful paradigm to model data. Both Go and Rust are incredibly interesting languages, in very different ways. In some ideal world, Go fits in a scaling/efficiency vertical somewhere in-between C and C++ (it's very specific but it basically encompasses…

Go has a runtime, so it's not correct to compare it to C/C++. Probably it's more accurate to say that Go is the next generation Java/C#.

Regarding Rust, it's a systems programming language (with this definition, one can skip the different opinions about it being "more C" or "more C++"), with the implications of the category: primarily, that it's undesirable for web developers to deal with the overhead of systems programming.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#129
post #6

If you're in the web sector, definitely give a try to wasm. Have a go at Rust while you're at it — see what I did there? I'm personally hot for GraphQL because it's a powerful paradigm to model data. Both Go and Rust are incredibly interesting languages, in very different ways. In some ideal world, Go fits in a scaling/efficiency vertical somewhere in-between C and C++ (it's very specific but it basically encompasses…

Go competes with GC-based and scripting languages, not really with either C or C++. Rust is "C++ like" in a broad sense, but highly simplified and offering memory safety, so it's also competing both with C (except in deep embedded where some platforms might not support it) and (to a lesser extent than Go, tbh) with higher-level or scripting languages. While it's not literally applicable to "anything and everything" i…

> scripting languages

That's what they say, but in practice people report that the lack of the more intuitive tooling like REPL in Python is a common reason not to use Go for scripts.

> not really with either C or C++

Well in terms of e.g. concurrency, compiling, syntax... the initial intent by Pike and Thompson was clearly unambiguously to do better than C++, which was the language they used at Google at the time.

They literally dug up SCP (1978) and the Oberon family to design a simpler, more manageable approach (the Go spec really is user-centric from inception). It was also months after the release of the first multicore CPU by Intel (Core2Duo iirc?) which paved the way to parallelism.

Regarding C, I agree in terms of domain / purpose insofar as C goes below (not familiar with it myself but cgo lets you inject C). I suppose I mentioned C because that's the standard performance benchmark that people tend to aim for (including the Go team, often), and Go is often a very valid albeit much simpler direct alternative to writing some package in C.

About Rust, thanks a lot for the precisions. I'm not as familiar with it as Go. I do find that Rust has incredible potential to be a really good high-level language, much more expressive than Go will ever be (by design, different goals).

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#130
I came here to tell OP to spend the time learning something like Terraform because it is not a trend or a fad, has wide adoption by the enterprise, gets them closer to the metal in understanding how everything works and will almost definitely help them in their career.

I've instead found a flame war with someone presuming a person's age and preceding to talk about how much better they are ... oh HN why does it always come to this.

You were once a person who knew less. Someone probably helped you along the way too. Just be a decent human and give an answer without trying to prove how wonderful you are

Post reply on HN