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Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

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

#391

Post by yellowapple »

tmaly wrote: post #82
Zhyl wrote: post #8

Weirdly, perl. I found myself on a client site in a locked down environment with only the Windows version of GIT installed. Powershell disabled, no other programs allowed. I had to produce reports on the log files for this machine, but had to obfuscate information before taking it off the server. I discovered that git had bash installed quite early on, so my initial automation and reporting was based on UNIX pipeline…

My team has used Perl successfully for 13 years. We use modern Perl and the code is clean. In the process of switching new team members to Python as it is hard to hire people with Perl. I still think the meta capability in Perl is stronger than Python.

Meanwhile, I had a hard time finding (or getting) a Perl programming job (though I resisted coming to the Bay Area for a long time, so that was likely a significant factor). I've had to settle with other languages (mostly Ruby, Elixir, and now Python professionally, though I did sneak a bit of Perl into the Ruby one ;) ).

Where are y'all based? I'm reasonably happy with my current job, but I'm definitely curious about what else is out there (especially if it's not in the Bay Area).

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

#392

Post by SwellJoe »

Dowwie wrote: post #32

Rust! :) I've been working full time with Rust this year for web development using postgres. The language and ecosystem have largely been sufficient for creating a robust platform. I have been working with the latest version of stable Rust all year and have never experienced breaking changes. Working with futures was unnecessarily difficult. Async/await is releasing next year, hopefully in Q1. This will simplify futu…

Rust has been the most surprisingly fun thing I learned this year. I was shocked at how quickly I was productive (even while still having no idea what I was doing). It really is astonishingly like using a very high level language, with a few weird quirks.

I'm really looking forward to building something bigger with it in 2019. I don't know what it'll be yet, but it was such a satisfying experience working with a low-level language (which I haven't done in 15 years, or so), and having it be really pleasant. I think it's impossible to overstate how important having a good way to easily install libraries/modules/whatever is, and Cargo gets it right in ways that few systems languages ever have (that I'm aware of, anyway).

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

#393

Post by javajosh »

A big year for me: Python+MyPy and Mongo on the backend, and Redux, RxJs, TypeScript on the front-end. Plus a huge assortment of new (to me) tools like Jira, Zeplin and VSCode. A deepening use of AWS, Docker, and Jenkins plus a little Kubernetes.

(You didn't ask but I think Mongo is particularly terrible, and Redux is particularly good. RxJs is probably the weirdest thing on the list, and the hardest to debug. Frankly I think I'd prefer async/await or generators.)

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

#394

Post by pzixel »

sam0x17 wrote: post #313

2018 was the year of Crystal lang for me. I have now all but replaced Ruby in my workflow with Crystal. I also learned Rust, but abandoned this effort as I found it took me 6x longer to get anything done, which is a shame because I love everything Rust stands for.

Yep, there is a great picture of how it looks like: https://imgur.com/sj92dyW

I faced it myself. It took me a year to being able to write a simple snippet (e.g. reverse UTF8 string) without getting compile-time errors. Now I'm a bit less productive then in C# with writing the code, but I'm much more confident about it.

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

#395

Post by thrownaway954 »

PHP and Wordpress

Had to start over at the bottom after alcohol addiction destroyed me.

Landed a job working with WordPress and started having quite a bit of with it. Naturally I just HAD to start tinkering and learned PHP to write plugins and manipulate the hell out of it.

PHP isn't all that bad and is actually pretty easy to pick up. My only gripe with it is that quite a bit of the libraries aren't on par with other languages I've used. For instance, PDF generation libraries aren't nearly as good as Ruby, .Net, heck even ColdFusion is better.

Great thing about Wordpress is that thr plugin eco system makes stitching websites together a breeze. There is a plugin for almost anything.

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

#396

Post by closeparen »

PKI. After many years of reluctantly fumbling around with OpenSSL as needed, I took the time to learn X.509 in more depth and to get comfortable with Go's "crypto/x509," which is a pleasure to work with. I'm now a lot more comfortable programming with TLS and certificates.

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

#397

Post by wholien »

dsiegel2275 wrote: post #23

Machine Learning. In 2018 I went from "zero to sixty", so to speak. At the beginning of the year I knew nothing about ML, and my math skills had gotten so rusty I couldn't even remember how to do simple derivatives or multiply two matrices. In the first half of 2018 I relearned the college math that I had forgotten by working through MIT OCW's Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability courses. In the Fall, I enrolled…

When you say you enrolled in 10-601, what did you do? I assume you aren't actually a student at CMU.
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