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

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

#341

Post by exasperaited »

bartvk wrote: post #317
exasperaited wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system. The problem is exactly that, yes. If you want a simple shape and maybe to stick a thread on it (one of the first things I printed) then OpenSCAD has the basics and there are really interesting libraries. But if you get into something complex, you end up building your own scheme and then constantly gardening it. The compl…

I love free software. However I'm still kinda doubting... should I want to take a commercial job, aren't we expected to use Solidworks or something? But yeah, thinking in CAD is probably the major step here.

I am no expert but my take on this is:

FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).

I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.

But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.

There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.

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

#342

Post by imron »

kukkeliskuu wrote: post #270
imron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) > the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me. Then I wonder if it’s j…

> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) Fair enough :-) This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the mom…

Thanks for the info. I try a mix of things I know well and things I want to play around with.

Swift and iOS was something that didn’t work so well for me. I wanted to play around with face capture and spent a day with Claude putting together a small app that showed realtime video of a face and put dots on/around various facial features and printed log messages if the person changed the direction they were looking (up down left right) and played a sound when they opened their mouth.

I’ve done app development before, but it’s been a few years so was a little bit rusty and it felt like Claude was really helping me out.

Then I got to a point I was happy with and I thought I’d go deeper in the code to understand what it was doing and how it was working (not a delegation issue as per another comment, this was a play/learning exercise for me so wanted to understand how it all worked) - and right there in the apple developer documentation was a sample so that did basically the same thing as my app, only the code was far simpler and after reading through the accompanying docs I realized the Claude version had a threading issue waiting to happen that was explicitly warned against in the docs of the api calls it was using.

If I’d gone to the developer docs in the beginning I would have had a better app, and better understanding in maybe a quarter of the time.

Appreciate the info on spend. The above session was on the $30/month version of Claude.

I guess I need to just keep flapping my wings until I can draw the owl.

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

#343

Post by rijavecb »

I'm planning to read more, mostly technical books recommended by the fine folks on the Book Overflow podcast and a few books on writing. As someone who's mostly self-taught, I know I have many gaps in my knowledge, so I'd like to fill some of those. And learning new things just feels great.

I'm also hoping to improve my Romanian. While I can get by (my wife is Romanian and we live there), I make waay too many mistakes, and considering I've been living there for a few years now, I feel I should do better.

This year has been pretty busy with personal things and working on my own apps, so I hope next year I can get back to learning things I find interesting and useful.

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

#344

Post by imron »

amitav1 wrote: post #261
imron wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m perfectly comfortable and used to delegating, but delegation requires trust that the result will be fit for purpose. It doesn’t have to be exactly how I would do it but at a minimum it has to work correctly and have acceptable performance for the task at hand. This doesn’t mean being super optimized just that it shouldn’t be doing stupid things like n+1 requests or database queries etc. See a sibling comment for…

Not trying to downplay your grievances, but isn't this what [Skills]( https://claude.com/skills ) are for? After going back and forth on something like that, create a skill that's something along the lines of `database-query-speed-optimization` "Some rules of thumb for using database queries: - Use joins - Streaming results is faster - etc. " That way, the next time you have to do something like this, you can remind…

Yeah it is but firstly this example was from before skills were a thing and secondly the rules might not be universally applicable.

In this case the two tables shared 1:1 mapping of primary key to foreign key so the join was fast and exact - but there are situations where that won’t the case.

And yeah this means slowly building out skills with enough conditions and rules and advice.

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

#345

Post by Rendello »

tasuki wrote: post #319
Rendello wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swam a lot as a kid as my mother was a lifeguard and instructor. Despite that, I was never amazing at it, probably because I was lean and had no buoyancy, but I loved it a lot. I swam for the first time in years a few months ago, and was surprised how exhausted I was after 30 minutes of treading water! I work out and go on frequent long runs, but I was totally spent from that. I too would love to get into it again,…

Never amazing at swimming because you lacked buoyancy? I know people who are plenty buoyant: they aren't fast swimmers!

Haha yes. Well, I'm pretty sure most pro swimmers are very lean and muscular (ie. not buoyant), so that's not the whole story. I was decent enough at swimming but never great at floating.

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

#346

Post by b2w »

huhkerrf wrote: post #106

I want to learn how to swim. I never took lessons as a kid, and, while I can get from one edge of the pool to the other, I want to feel completely comfortable. Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.

There are plenty of skills involved to develop and improve here like floating, body position, kicking, breathing, etc. Plan it out and make it count!

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

#348

Post by ChuckMcM »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #145
ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators. Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration. Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup…

> Become conversational in Ukrainian. This one caught my eye! What is your motivation?

I believe that the outcome of the Ukraine-Russian will shape the world for decades just as WWII did. It is my hope that the Ukrainians succeed in throwing the Russians out of their country. In a post war Ukraine, I'd like to help it rebuild in any way I can, and to do that I have to speak Ukrainian at least conversationally.

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

#349

Post by esperent »

onion2k wrote: post #116

I want to get better at Systems Thinking. I'm fairly certain that while AI is going to get better and better at most things, it's only ever going to be able to look as far ahead as the prompt it's given and the context available. Architecting a system that can be won't grind to a halt after years of prompt-based additions is going to be a key skill, and the foundation of that is building high quality systems on top o…

You're probably already aware of this book but just in case, have you read Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donnela Meadows?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-syst...

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