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

Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.

Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.

The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.

I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.

I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.

Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India

I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking

Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.

Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).

Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn

De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!

Write an operating system in Forth.

I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.

Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE