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

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241–250 of 433 posts

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

#241
My post is very contrary to the most here but maybe there is someone else in a similar situation so i think it may be worth writing it.

Background: I've spend the bigger part of the past 20 years of my life continously extending and enhancing my technical knowledge and skills, mostly in IT/Coding but also in some other fields. Meanwhile i kinda let my social life completely degrade and also always care more about solving others problems than my actual own problems.

Therefor the "skills" i want to improve and develop in 2026:

- Learn to take care of myself instead of always putting others first (its not my job to safe the world)

- Don't try to got 150% all of the time and rather slow down

- Care for my health

- Get back into social life

- Actually try to not spend 95% of my free time in front of a screen and go outside (touch grass)

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While i accumulated alot of knowledge over the past two decades, if i don't start to care for myself more ill probably won't have much benefit of it other than having accumulated it. Health (biological and mental) are important, neglecting it maybe works shortterm but will kick your ass longterm.

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

#244

- Do the splits! - Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year. - Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less…

[dead]

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

#245
Work: 1. Learning about manufacturing processes for high-throughput electroplating. 2. Learn pymatgen and other tools for building a self-driving lab for materials discovery and testing.

Non-work: 1. Improving my writing skills and start my blog with a few technical and non-technical posts.

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

#246
I used to DJ in the 90's with vinyl on 1210s decks. A lot has changed in the industry and I'd like to spin at home for fun since I'm still a "househead".

Anyone knows a good YT channel that explains my options? Money is tight these days so I'm unable to buy the latest and greatest but I'm curious of the new technology used.

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

#248
post #190
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 replac…

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check it out :)

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

#249
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand. This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age) > Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but…

How did you develop your CAD and 3D printing skills? Did you use any online courses?

No courses on the 3D printing side really — I think I did go through one of the Prusa ones after getting enough free "meters" on Printables but I don't remember it telling me much I hadn't already learned. There is a blog post that has been posted here before that really covers almost everything important about design for 3D printing:

https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/

I really just ADHD'd the hell out of it, I suspect [0], and absorbed everything I read. I was in financial difficulty and things were expensive so it took me a couple of years to get me from "I'd like a 3D printer" to "this 3D printer is affordable but viable and even if I never learn design there are plenty of tools I can make with it that will save me money".

In that time I read everything I could about what I'd need to learn, convinced myself that I was not so clumsy and inept I couldn't maintain a printer. These days printers don't need so much mechanical knowledge to get started.

On the CAD side of things, I learned a bit of OpenSCAD, found it basically helpful to make one simple thing but also frustrating and disappointing, joined really useful non-public Facebook groups where people were working on similar things, decided to get properly into FreeCAD, and dug in with the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube (which actually are now organised into a course structure, but weren't really then).

The thing that motivated me mostly was having simple real things I wanted to make for a project I was working on (though my brain being what it is, I still haven't got round to that exact project...)

If you have a need for a thing you would like, and you're able to break it down into simpler projects, particularly if they are things you might find useful along the way, it's not very difficult to find the motivation to learn these two things.

The positive feedback loop is so strong, and 3D printing is such a concrete way to learn CAD and design because you get to hold your design so quickly: I designed this thing in CAD, I printed this thing, wow it works but I could improve this, I need to learn this new thing in CAD, I printed it, it works but… etc.

Pretty soon you find yourself staring at some real world object on your desk and modelling it in CAD for fun.

The really interesting thing is when you begin to understand that the design of things is fundamentally influenced by the tooling used to make them. When you grasp how 3D printing and injection moulding differ, for example, and start designing your own items with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, rather than just to look like an existing plastic part which was moulded, then you're really getting there.

[0] hilariously I am still not formally diagnosed. Though I'm pretty sure I could be diagnosed just based on these two comments.

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

#250

Touch-typing. In some countries it's common to learn this at school as a teenager but that's not true of all countries. With LLMs this skill has become significantly more important to programmers.

Speaking of, are there resources for people who type fast but want to get competitive, ie into the top 20 on typeracer for example? Beyond "just" practicing.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

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