Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
191–200 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#192I 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…
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#193Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#194It's not a 'hottest tech stack', but I would suggest people take 2020 to learn testing. TDD/unit/browser/whatever - look to incorporate testing in to your work more often. For me, that has meant making sure code you're writing is testable first. I don't do hardcore TDD, but often am writing tests more or less concurrently with little bits as I'm writing those bits. I don't do this for every single project all the tim…
How is this something to learn? It's more of something to try. Anyone who can write code can write tests and anyone who can write tests can writes tests before they code. It's trivial. Instead learn formal methods. Learn how to prove your code correct for all cases rather then verifying your code for one test case. This is learning and it won't be rehashing what you know like tdd. Formal methods is brutally hard.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#1951) Elixir: since I teach it, I pretty much need to keep digging further and further into its ecosystem, looking for useful things to share with my audience and looking for better ways of building things. For example, the series I'm in the middle of is on LiveView and the next in my queue is on Absinthe/GraphQL. I knew nothing about LiveView a year ago and spent a good amount of time last spring struggling with various Absinthe-related tasks. A year from now there will be even more "must-learn" libraries.
2) The intersection of development and marketing: as a developer, there are marketing systems I can build by myself that would be very difficult for most smaller online businesses to do, but also highly valuable. I've been taking some of Brennan Dunn's courses (working on his ConvertKit course at the moment) and it's been one of the best investments I've made.
3) Rust: I don't have any business reason to learn Rust at the moment. However, it's a particularly good complement to Elixir. Elixir's strengths are stability and productivity, but it's a bit weak in brute force number crunching. Compiling natively invoked functions in C/C++ has been a thing for a long time, but at a terrible cost. If those functions trigger an exception, they can take down the entire EVM, negating the famous stability of Erlang/Elixir. Rust, on the other hand, is very good at making the most of the CPU and memory available in a manner that guarantees safety. So NIFs written in Rust can be used in Elixir projects without fear!
I'm also interested in using Rust with WASM, so there are multiple ways I can see learning it paying off down the road.
For anyone out there learning Elixir: You might want to check out Alchemist Camp. I've had overwhelmingly positive feedback from people who have used it to learn Elixir from scratch (https://alchemist.camp/episodes, scroll down to the bottom and click Lesson 1)
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#196Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#197Learn 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…
What resources do you recommend for learning relational databases and key value stores really well?
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#198Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#199For my own learning, I'm pursing three things: 1) Elixir: since I teach it, I pretty much need to keep digging further and further into its ecosystem, looking for useful things to share with my audience and looking for better ways of building things. For example, the series I'm in the middle of is on LiveView and the next in my queue is on Absinthe/GraphQL. I knew nothing about LiveView a year ago and spent a good am…
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#200Learn 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…
+1 for relational models. All data access is relational in some way, and knowing how to efficiently access/index the data is an important step for building efficient applications.