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Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

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

#261

Post by wolfoftheweb »

ptr wrote: post #127
Dowwie wrote: 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...

What do you recommend for aggregating and scraping the data? I’ve been working with PyCharm and BeautifulSoup4.

Also, any suggestions for the best ways to apply the data to a website if the data is being refreshed daily? I’ve been using csv files to pass the variables into a Wordpress theme / post but it seems like building something from scratch would be more efficient in the long term.

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

#262

Post by inimino »

manvsmachine wrote: post #13

From what you've mentioned, I'm focusing on Go and GraphQL professionally (I'm a backend engineer). Flutter will definitely get looked at. Something I'd add if you also spend time in backends is infra - choose a system (probably AWS, GCP, or Azure in that order) and a infrastructure-as-code middleware for them (e.g, Terraform). More and more these days, the provider is now part of the stack.

> More and more these days, the provider is now part of the stack.

That's a mistake, which industry will eventually recognize if it hasn't already.

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

#263

Post by kugelblitz »

ksec wrote: post #214
sp0rk wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? This line added absolutely no value to your comment (try reading your comment without the opening line and tell me it's any different) and resulted in a lot of distraction from the rest of the conversation. It's curious to me that you decided to include it even though, as indicated by the disclaimer you provide at the beginning, you knew its po…

Not OP, but I think there is a reason for it, although I do agree it might have been better phased. Assuming Good intention, ( Which I think OP is ) sometimes it is a little hard for people under certain age to understand certain things. It is simply a reflect on our stupidity that when we were young, we too were also singing, praising and hyping all the shiny tech. And we were burnt by it. So it was more like a sugg…

Yes, I might have phrased it better, but the intention was that at a younger age, you perhaps didn't yet have to upgrade a legacy projects with semi-obscure tooling where the original developers have long left; or have had to hack your code in a dirty way because the team leader might have read about e.g. an experimental frontend framework and a DB system that is in alpha status, but still orders the team to use it (to show the company that he/she is using cutting edge tech), so 80% of the time you're just figuring out how to get the system running instead of actually creating value for the project.

The first time it happened, I was like "it's fine, we can just rewrite modules A and B". As the years go by, I see it more and more. And now being a freelancer and having been in about about 15 projects, 1/3 greenfield and 2/3 legacy, I see a pattern.

Use the most appropriate tool for the task (taking into account not just the tech itself, but also the market, the maturity, possibility to find developers, etc), not the "hot tool of the day".

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

#264

Post by nextos »

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

Will compilation to categories have an impact on biotech, more specifically on synthetic biology?

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

#265

Post by SahAssar »

cobby wrote: post #14

Some frontend framework with fine-grained DOM updates like Solid by Ryan Carniato, Surplus or Svelte. Why: Frameworks that use fine-grained DOM updated currently top js frameworks benchmark [1]. Svelte lags a bit behind in performance but it offers a better developer experience [1]: https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/master/we...

I thought the idea behind these were not that the DOM updates are "fine-grained" (they are in all modern frameworks), but that they usually skip the "VDOM with a global state" model and instead try to have smaller chunks of a page control itself.

So they might work very well if you can contain the state to a single component, but if you have deep shared state dependencies or changes in state in one component that changes a lot of other parts of the site it won't work as well.

I'd also question if (with most modern frameworks) the framework is the primary bottleneck. I usually use hyperapp-v1 as my frontend and find that loading less and optimizing my own code usually leads to better gains than tinkering in the framework.

Not saying that one should ignore benchmarks, but they should also not be the "end-all" measure of a framework.

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

#266

Post by wolfoftheweb »

elicash wrote: post #113
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…

What a condescending response. Yes, this person is a student. No reason to act like this.

Regardless of age or career, I think most of us are lifelong students of one kind or another.

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

#267

Post by bostik »

motohagiography wrote: post #63

Today, my background is 25'ish years in security design. My near term aspirations about the ideas that will matter in 10 years from now include more functional programming with Haskell's QIO monad for basic quantum related concepts, understanding GANs, the gremlin stack for graphs instead of cypher, and maybe some category theory. Solving problems in these areas is the foundational knowledge for the next 10-20 years…

More than focusing on any single technology, I am willing to drive my stake to the ground here.

If you have the background, or sufficient interest in security, add two things to the mix: psychology and usability. The UX of security related software/solutions are nothing if not atrocious. Fixing that would be a good start, but I won't hold my breath. It's also going to be increasingly important to understand why people - both individually and in aggregate - do/choose/prefer certain things over others.

This goes way beyond blind A/B testing, btw: you can't just throw random experiments on the wall and see what happens to produce the best incremental ROI. You'll have to actually think about paths, not just the next fork in the road.

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

#269

Post by wenc »

jlelonm wrote: post #184
Dowwie wrote: 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…

What resources do you recommend for learning relational databases and key value stores really well?

Relational: Jennifer Widom's Stanford MOOC is often highly recommended.

https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

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

#270

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #186
mgkimsal wrote: post #172

It'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.

>Anyone who can write code can write tests and anyone who can write tests can writes tests before they code. It's trivial.

It's also trivial to create an absolutely brittle mess of a test suite. Building a solid, performant and reliable test suite is an art that, in my experience, the vast majority of devs do not seem to have much skill in.

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