Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–326 of 326 posts

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#321

Post by ahpearce »

steve-chavez wrote: post #308
ahpearce wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not always a great idea. There is a reason APIs exist, and backend service layers exist on top of databases. It is a larger abstraction of the interface design pattern. It only makes sense if you're absolutely sure you'll never need to extend or change the interaction between front-end and back-end. Think just about schema migrations on the database. If you change your schema, you have to change your front-en…

Don't forget that the database is not only tables. Abstraction can be done at the SQL level with views. With views you can maintain backwards compatibility despite migrations happening. No need to change your front-end. Check this section of the PostgREST docs for more details: http://postgrest.org/en/v7.0.0/schema_structure.html#schema-...

Yeah, views can definitely fit certain use cases. I've just never encountered cases where I eventually don't need to /do something else/ in between those two layers. Granted I'm doing a lot of systems integration on a lot of complex legacy infrastructure, so that might just be me!

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#322

Post by eatmygodetia »

chronal wrote: post #205
eatmygodetia wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a general-purpose programming language, so it can be used for most projects. Most problems can be solved with most languages, sure, but rust is fast and "safe", so people flock to it. It has some nice features. Personally I never found myself besotted with it, in fact I rather dislike it and suggest ada instead. But rust is much more likely to get you a job.

Would you mind sharing your thoughts on why you'd suggest Ada? What features of Ada make it an interesting/useful language?

I'm suggesting Ada because in my mind it satisfies a similar niche to Rust, but offers a different perspective to Rust. Also I like it more.

Ada is part of the Pascal family, but goes further as it were in all the Pascal aspects, making it essentially the ultimate Pascal. In that regard it's interesting just by being different from C.

It's much more verbose than a lot of languages, which some people like, some people don't, I do. But even if you don't, it's nice to explore some of the design decisions taken in a language designed for use in large-scale systems with long lives.

It was created as /the/ language of the US Department of Defense, which once again may not interest you. I think that in itself makes it exciting, despite having almost no interest in any other aspect of the US.

The compiler has a linter (I guess is the right word) built in, similar to Go or something. It also checks for all sorts of other little errors or potential problems like misspellings, scope, overflows, and off-by-ones. As a language designed to be used in systems controlling space equipment, train networks, and other massive and important things, these features are quite important. I guess more languages have these things now but they were an Ada priority from the beginning.

Useful is definitely relative and for a lot of things Ada won't be the best choice. I've used it for very little, but I think it's a really well done language for the most part that suffers from not being so popular. Now that a lot of other systems languages are getting thrown around - Rust, Go, and things like Nim and Zig - I think Ada should get a share of the light too.

But ultimately I just think that "learn Rust" is said much too often with much too little justification when so many other languages that could be equally as enlightening or fun are around.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#323

Post by AlexCoventry »

lenkite wrote: post #158
AlexCoventry wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written 5-line C++ programs which have stumped experts for hours. There's a trilogy of books about all its edge cases and best practices for working around them... C++ still has a place, but not as a beginning systems language.

I hope we never judge how easy is it to learn and use a programming language by obfuscated code contests. All languages will fail by that measure in their lifetime as they accumulate cruft.

This wasn't obfuscated code. This was a MWE, where I was trying to understand why it wasn't working as expected.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#324

Post by 1qazxsw23edc »

bashwizard wrote: post #317
1qazxsw23edc wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but did you got a remote position after learning and practising all this because I'm interested in only remote positions.

I did not get a remote position. I eventually left the company though and started do consulting instead so I'm mostly working remote (and 100% at this point due to covid).

ok, thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#325

Post by ornornor »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #310
pknerd wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I performed site optimization worked and loved it. Couldn't find a way to Cash it as an alternative income stream. I'd explore it again. Also web performance don't mean front end only. Most of db driven sites don't even have basic indexing done.

Amen brother! In the decade I spent in that space, customers always thought they had esoteric memory issues or had found some kernel bug. Nope, you just forgot to do the basics like oh dunno... check if it even runs? DB indexing? pfffttt, who does that? ;-)

Where I work, we never ever index anything. And we use text types for every column, especially dates and IDs. Fun times.
Post reply on HN