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Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

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Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#181

Post by jjude »

I want to get good at "taste"

I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].

If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.

I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.

[1]: https://jjude.com/substack-for-apps/

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#182

Post by pdimitar »

- MANDATORY: Re-learn focus. I will not self-diagnose but I exhibit ADHD symptoms and I started actively fighting them back (they mostly come from the phone). I am not going to just deny myself access to apps on schedule -- my brain never clicked schedule, not even once in my life -- but through a persistent and sustainable self-change from deep within. It's slow but it's beginning to work.

- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.

- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.

- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.

In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#183

Post by david_allison »

dielll wrote: post #175

Kotlin and Golang. I know it6not advisable to learn 2 languages at the same time but I want Kotlin for android apps and Go for backend. Been working alot with python and I want to shift to a different stack and hopefully get a change of careers from Test Automation/ QA to a more coding focused role(backend, android)

I'm co-maintaining an open source Android app (primarily Kotlin, with Svelte & Rust). I'd be happy to mentor in 2026.

Feel free to get in touch if you're interested:

https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBU...

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#184

Post by mawadev »

It's not a skill in particular but I want to decouple the way I think from todays economics. I want to learn skills that give me confidence and well being instead of training me to be a better cog in the machinery, so that I can impress other people or put a price tag next to the value of me as a human. Just enough to be average, but not more to end up living to work to fuel delusions.

I also don't want to be derailed from hyped up technologies that ultimately sell me on a quick path to reach a delusional goal. I want steady and consistent growth and understand the makings deeply.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#185

Post by dynamite-ready »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #172
brailsafe wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work? The difference between delegating to a human vs an LLM is that a human is liable for understanding it, regardless of how it got there. Delegating to an LLM means you're just more rapidly creating liabilities for yourself, which indeed is a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the complexity of what you're losing intimate knowledge of.

As a technical manager, I'm liable for every line of code we produce - regardless of who in the team actually wrote the code. This is why I review every pull request :)

This is interesting. At what level and team size? There's going to have to be a point where you just give in to the 'vibes' (whether it's from a human, or a machine), otherwise you become the bottleneck, no?

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#187

Post by wawhal »

Here's mine: 0. Build the habit of taking notes ruthlessly to build a comprehensive second brain. 1. I transitioned to the penhold grip in Table Tennis in Nov 2025 and it has been a fun exploration. My goal for 2026 is to learn to play all the strokes comfortably with the penhold grip, and start competing at the district level. 2. Go from novice-intermediate to upper-intermediate in piano playing. Learn, memorize, and perform flawlessly 30 advanced piano pieces (minimum Henle 7–9) end-to-end, recorded on video, within the next 12 months. 3. Learn to speak Kannada. Been living in Bangalore past 9 years and it's almost embarrassing to not know a single complete Kannada sentence.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#189

Post by yallpendantools »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #27
kenrick95 wrote: post #7

I want to learn driving. I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more…

> I want to learn driving. Two low-risk and cheap ways to develop relevant driving skills are bumper cars[0] and go-karts[1]. This may appear to be silly at first, but both involve the same hand-eye coordination and decision skills of vehicular driving (though the latter is no where nearly as fun as the others). 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_cars 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-kart

I've been driving for about a year (with my first car too) when I drove a bunch of friends to an out-of-town amusement park. It's some kind of car-warming thing for me. It's about an hour-long drive without traffic.

In the park, I made it a hard point not to ride the bumper cars because I thought it would mess with my muscle-memory as the designated driver. If not for that, I really love bumper cars. However, I've found that responsiveness of bumper cars vary a lot per park; it either depends on the maintenance or the maker of the rides. And IME, none of them are really comparable to even the shittiest cars I've driven (e.g., the ones from the driving school, the assigned car for my license test).

But my bigger concern that day was the fact that the bumper car mindset is not the roadcar driver mindset. For learners, the free-for-all chaotic nature of the track is not even a good simulation! Not even if you're driving somewhere like India or China.

Speaking of simulation, I really want an affordable but legit way to practice dealing with outlier driving scenarios. Like, what if my brake fails in the highway, what if I get a flat while doing 100KPH---stuff even the safest, most defensive drivers can't entirely rule out. Anyone know of games that might fit the bill?

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#190

Post by wawhal »

Zambyte wrote: post #43

I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress. I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle wi…

Try PianoForAll. My experience, fwiw - Pianoforall was instrumental in helping me play real music at parties and make the piano journey rewarding and enjoyable early on. Without that, the early days of learning classical music, music theory, practicing scales, ballads etc were a limbo - you don't feel like you are making progress (even when you are).

That said, PFA only compliments your classical syllabus, not replaces it.

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