Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

news.ycombinator.com

341–350 of 620 posts

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#341

Nothing! My first few years programming I learned 2-3 languages per year, and this was the first year that I focused only on improving at tech I was already using, as well as language-agnostic fundamentals.

Same boat as you. I used to boast about learning 2-3 languages a year. Now I aim to improve on what I already know instead of learning new technologies just to tick a box.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#342
Flutter. It is so convenient to be able to create a good-looking app that run fluently on both iOS and Android, while having high quality widgets that you can customize very easily… The learning curve is quite easy to climb, and you can inspect how anything is made to create your own, specific widgets if you want.

The only weird thing at first is Dart, but it is so close to any common language that it never was a problem for me. And it is so good to use a language with both AOT compilation and a quick reload mechanism!

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#343
post #333

- Rust - I had tried learning C++ before but I found it confusing, especially the ecosystem. I have not built anything serious with Rust but it was easy to learn imo compared to C++, especially since it has a package manager and also the Rust book is amazing. I knew the basics of pointers but I had never really worked directly with them. Learned a lot. Now I've been dabbling with C++ (because some programs I'd like t…

> packet manager

Hate to nitpick but package manager.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also consider learning R. Anything you can do in Pandas can be done, with less difficulty or fuss, in R. Plus, the plotting is much, much better.

If he/she has Tableau, they'll use it instead of R probably for the charting.

Most visualizations that can be done in Tableau is possible in R, especially with ggplot2 and the various plug-ins published.

I steer my team away from using Tableau because it is bloated software. Anyone who is serious about working in data science or data visualization should steer clear of it.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#345
Serverless. I started playing around with some of the open source frameworks that exist (mainly OpenFaaS and Openwhisk) and found the experience pretty cool. Certainly, serverless doesn't work for everything and might be a bit overhyped, but it's a very pleasant development experience at times, especially with OpenFaaS imo. I also added a crystal template for OpenFaaS (https://github.com/TPei/crystal_openfaas)

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#346
I got back into Rust this year via WebAssembly! It was really fun to make this little A* pathfinding demo: https://github.com/jakedeichert/wasm-astar

After that little project, I got started on an api service in Crystal. Crystal was interesting to try out, but I decided to switch to Rust after a few weeks since the ecosystem/community is much larger. I first chose to use the Rocket framework [0] but switched to actix-web [1] after a few weeks so I didn't have to use nightly anymore. So far actix-web has been great, but I'll be keeping my eye on Rocket going stable hopefully sometime in 2019, and also another library called warp [2].

I've also got another wasm project in the works... hoping to finish that off soon and publish sometime next month.

[0]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket

[1]: https://github.com/actix/actix-web

[2]: https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#347

Vue.js. I use it exclusively for front end now and have ditched Angular 2/React all together. I even got it approved for use in the very large enterprise I work at (internal apps only of course, but we have a lot of those). I also embraced messaging for good and was shocked at how easy NServiceBus makes everything regarding AMPQ. I continued to celebrate .NET Core advancements and use it for all my server side progra…

Why Vue.js over Angular/React?

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#348

Polished my Golang skills and Python skills. Studied the Deep Learning Book Theory and toy examples with Keras and Torch. Some good ol C by implementing linear solvers. Understood the inner workings of bitcoin and started working on a better version of it. Most of all the month I spent pouring on Homomorphic Encryption literature was very useful. I also went trough some cryptography books (math from Koblitz book and…

What do you use Go for? Python is my go to language, but I'm increasingly seeing things supporting Go too.

When would you pick one over the other, do you think it's working learning Go or just focusing on python?

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#349
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this day and age, with Python and all, is Perl still worth learning?

It's worth getting a few insights into what it does well. As with any language it _can_ do anything, but a few key features that made it stand out for me: * Perl is set up for really terse one-liners. You can basically emulate or surpass most Unix tools with only a cursory knowledge of the syntax * Perl syntax is highly geared towards text processing and regular expressions. File handling and regexes are so much quic…

> * Perl is set up for really terse one-liners. You can basically emulate or surpass most Unix tools with only a cursory knowledge of the syntax

This definitely interests me. How does perl surpass Unix tools? I guess perl has the benefit of handling the equivalent of sed and awk.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#350
ReasonML and ReasonReact.

To be frank I've used OCaml before and I use Haskell almost daily. So with this caveat, I'd like to say ReasonML and ReasonReact are generally easy to learn and make web apps in. The only bit of difficulty was when React wasn't enough for my use case and I had to drop down to raw DOM manipulation. That was quite a bit of trial and error and Obj.magic involved. I still don't fully understand how it maps DOM types (HTMLElement, etc) to OCaml types but I already feel productive enough that I want to use the tech again.

Post reply on HN