Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by jointpdf » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

KasianFranks wrote: post #91

Unsupervised learning

In my experience, unsupervised learning is more broadly useful (and easier to implement) than supervised learning. Use it for data exploration, data validation, anomaly detection, topic modeling, recommender systems, cluster analysis, etc.

Recommended algorithms:

- UMAP (https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap/blob/master/README.rst)

- HDBSCAN (https://github.com/scikit-learn-contrib/hdbscan/blob/master/...)

- MatrixProfile (https://github.com/target/matrixprofile-ts/blob/master/READM...)

- NMF (https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.de...)

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

#132

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #121

kugelblitz wrote: post #59

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.

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

For context, I’m 45, but was an “expert beginner” staying at one company for over a decade before I took my career seriously a little over a decade ago. I also don’t live on the west coast where both salaries and the cost of living are both far beyond normal.

My experience from being in the job market frequently, watching trends, talking to people in the industry locally and recruiters, is that it doesn’t take more than about 10 years to reach your salary peak as an individual contributor or even as a hands on team lead/architect no matter what “technology” you learn. Not saying that’s a bad thing. I’ll take more money if it is given to me, but that’s not really what I am optimizing for.

What I am optimizing for is to stay current with the trends and to know enough technology that is on the “Slope of Enlightenment” phase of the Hype Cycle. I’m doing that by making sure that I am both working for companies that are not using outdated or unmarketable tech and doing resume driven development. At 45, I can’t afford to be an out of touch old guy and then start whining about “ageism”. That’s good enough to get the “right now job”. Meaning if I need a job now I can email some recruiters and have another job within less than a month as a bog standard Enterprise CRUD Developer/Architect.

On the other hand, if you just focus on “technology” you’re a commodity. There are thousands of people who know “technology”. You can get a job quickly but it won’t pay that much above median.

Focus on architecture and how to deliver business value. I know plenty of “smart people(tm)” who can’t deliver code that makes money or saves money worth crap. This is the key to negotiating your way out of being another commodity developer.

Although to make a lot of money, knowing technology that is on the “Peak of Inflated Expectation” may help you to overcharge as a high price consultant by going after VC funded companies with no business plan and plenty of access to money. The best way to make money during a gold rush is by selling shovels. Right now, for me, that focus is “cloud consulting” or being a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. When and if that starts trending to the “trough of disillusionment”, I can always fall back to development.

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

#134

Post by azangru » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

kamranahmedse wrote: post #104

I am the maintainer of these roadmaps https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps if it may help. We are in the middle of updating them for 2020; frontend roadmap has been updated, backend and devops are expected to be published in the next couple of weeks. Also, one of my goals this year is to make these roadmaps interactive with clickable nodes, adding details for each and making them easier to follow for beginners.

> frontend roadmap has been updated

I don’t believe CSS modules belongs in the CSS-in-JS rubric; and you really ought to add Eleventy to the list of static-site generators; it’s on the rise and kicking serious ass (much better for a front-end developer than Jekyll, anyway).

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

#135

Post by mrosett » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #64

In a word: biotech. Okay, yeah, that's a bit beyond the scope of your question... Tech-wise I think the stealth silver-bullet will be "Categorical" programming†. When this hits it might even contract the job market for programmers. Compiling to categories" Conal Elliott http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/ † As in a kind of PL paradigm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm

I realize it may have been an offhand answer, but what do you have in mind? Go get a graduate level understanding of biochemistry? Start working with genomic data? Etc.

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

#136

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

kugelblitz wrote: post #59

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 important to know of the new tech, but I think diving deep into new tech just because it might seem cool now can be frustrating and inefficient long-term.

There is no “long term” in technology. The best way on average to stay competitive is by keeping up with what the market wants. Sure it’s possible to start a project that is profitable or that you can get someone to acquire but statistically that’s like buying lottery tickets as a retirement plan.

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

#137

Post by dgudkov » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

K0SM0S wrote: 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…

>If you're in the web sector, definitely give a try to wasm

Is there a reason to try WebAssembly besides curiosity or a need to optimize performance-heavy front-end computations in browser?

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

#138

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

qorrect wrote: post #123

kugelblitz wrote: post #59

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.

I have plenty of other things to do with my free time that don’t involve computers. If I’m going to spend time on a side project, it’s only going to either be to make money from the project or learn something that someone will pay me for.

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

#139

Post by corford » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

I'm going heavy in to a container first / cloud native workflow this year, mixing a few existing tools I know (Consul, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana) with some new ones: NATS Streaming, Nomad, Vault, Loki, Drone and minio.

Also want to get good at Makefiles (and play around with jsonnet if I have time).

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

#140

Post by simongray » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #115

Random_ernest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your arguments against the JVM if I might ask?

I don't hate the JVM, but there are certain applications where I'd like to have something that compiles to native code. And of course, the fact that the current steward of Java and the JVM is Oracle makes me a bit uneasy.

What about compiling to native executables using GraalVM? Doesn't remove Oracle from the equation, of course.