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

Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 620 posts

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

#511

Post by fenk85 »

rockyj wrote: post #148
walrus1066 wrote: post #130

Kotlin, our company had recently turned into a java shop, and I was literally tempted to throw in the towel because I'm used to C# & python, so the boilerplate was really unpalatable. Then one of our team wrote a service in kotlin, and we never looked back, I had my type inference, extension methods & null safety back, along with really strong immutability features, pure functions to boot. It is such a pleasure to wo…

I really liked Kotlin too. Which web framework do you recommend using with Kotlin (assuming you do webdev with Kotlin)?

Springboot 2 has good Kotlin support and more importantly it would be easier to convert management to the team using kotlin if they think all you are doing is spring. By time they realise you have several services running well and you get a wow. This is what happened to me.

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

#512

Post by parmesan »

jacquesm wrote: post #428
parmesan wrote: post #383

Nothing. Strangely enough, I can't think of anything new techy that I learned this year. I've worked full time remote in mobile and machine learning the last 3 years, but this year is special. This year has required me to set my own motivations and goals aside to really be there for my 18 months old daughter, and for my wife. At first I tried to resist and focus on both my family and my career, but I found it hard to…

I think you learned the most valuable thing about tech that you could possibly learn: that it is not the most important thing in life. Congratulations!

Thanks! And yes, that's indeed true. There's a fine line between passion and obsession. I found that my motivation and passion easily are morphed to their negative equivalents when I'm under pressure, or when I just need to focus on something else entirely.

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

#513

Post by Teknoman117 »

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 on my radar. Work has consumed my life this year, so I didn't spend a heck of a lot of time on it. Looks really cool though! I've read a lot about how the memory management works and have been trying to figure out how the API of a "rustic" GUI toolkit should look.

Mostly looking at react and redux for inspiration, as they try to champion unidirectional data flow. In theory, would let me avoid std::RefCell hell that I read about in the forums.

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

#514

Post by dave7 »

AlexMuir wrote: post #24

Blender and BabylonJS. I can't describe how fantastic Blender is - and 2.80, which is now in Beta, reduces render times for my project by 95% and that's not an exaggeration. Play with it over Christmas, you won't regret it!

I am currently halfway through making my first donut! (albeit in .79 for now). I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

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

#515

Post by eitland »

lucb1e wrote: post #363
amenod wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... the problem is that SO is becoming the only place where people hang out, and it's really difficult to find active programming forums nowadays. Except, as you say, SO is not a forum, it's a QA site. Which means there is no place left for discussions. While I certainly use SO a lot to find those small bits of missing knowledge, I think it has made search for help (in specific cases) actually much harder.

Agreed! I moved to HN and SO after two forums slowly died. I have some friends from those forums, but a chat group is different from a forum with dozens or sometimes hundreds of active topics every day. Not just in activity, but also the kind of things you can talk about. I'm not quite sure what is going to fill this gap. I don't always have a place to post things. Blogging doesn't exactly work without an audience. T…

dchuk tried to start https://hackerforums.co earlier this year.

It was a nice forum and I really wanted it to succeed and but it seems to have faded out.

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

#516

Post by Teknoman117 »

3 things this year for me - CMake, Rust, and Vulkan.

CMake is probably the only thing I can say I really "learned" during 2018, as I spent a lot of time reworking the build system where I work to use "Modern CMake". We manage a large cross platform code base and it had been bugging me that there were platform specific projects that had to be updated every time we added code (that had poor documentation of what random settings were made in some random subdialog of visual studio). Still hard pressed to convince the team of mostly Windows developers to give up their Visual Studio projects, but hey, if you choose to use CMake you can compile it for all of our supported platforms. The multiplatform CMake implementation is now actually smaller than the original single platform one, and a heck of a lot easier to read. Although, I do understand from their perspective that a CMake generated visual studio project is pretty ugly compared to a hand crafted one.

I spent a few weeks toying with Vulkan and have wrapped my brain around how it works (as a long time OpenGL developer). Not to the point where I could write it without the reference manual, but I can reason about problems with it.

I also spent a few weeks looking into Rust. Definitely on my list of things to spend real time on in 2019. I read enough to begin to understand how the borrow checker works, so I've spent time thinking about how to solve various problems I come across using that model. It's certainly affected how I write C++, much to the annoyance of my coworkers ("why don't use just pass a bare pointer? I don't want to read all this std::unique_ptr / std::move stuff!").

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

#518

Post by kamaal »

catacombs wrote: post #155
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…

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

Yes, if you don't want to be forced to write exception handling and doing a dozen different tricks for merely writing and using one single regular expression.

A lot of forced indentation and absence of braces, and absence of sigils makes it harder to read Python scripts. However that's not the only problem with Python. If you are scripting you want the regular `unix_command` command thingy to work fine. More-so you want to read the output of that thing using a syntax like my @command_output = `unix_command`;

You also want heredocs. And you want multiline anonymous functions. I could go on and on.

But Python seems to be more like a tool trying to compete with Java than Perl.

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

#519

Post by robertAngst »

wj wrote: post #273
robertAngst wrote: post #51

Real World Embedded Systems. Built a dishwasher that cleans and sets your dinner table. C++, Arduino, Electrical Engineering, and worked with a mechanical engineer on the design execution. Here is the story, skip to the bottom if you want to see the youtube video- Started this year working on a finance App, this one needed to be perfect. React Native, Laravel PHP mysql. The app is almost finished, and is worthy of a…

I'd love to hear about the finance app!

Thank you for the interest, would love to share the idea. I am considering its about 6 months from launching.

I'll start with the story-

Back when I was 18 and working at a clothing store, I asked my boss if I could be paid in NASDAQs instead of USD. The answer- No. I don't particularly like government currency, because the government prints more every year. However, the market grows at ~7%/yr. I still dreamed of getting paid in Investment.

The App-

This app tokenizes an S&P500 index fund. This way you can trade something 'better' than USD with friends. I also have an end goal of being able to spend it on a debit card, similar to my Bitcoin debit card Shift.

The programming was intense as it was my first time writing a database that did anything interesting. Wrote in double entry book keeping, friends, users etc..

Previous experience in database was merely submitting insert queries.

I have a few serious business considerations before I show it to my audience on my website(Efficiency Is Everything). But either way, I have a fully functional database with a front end for Web, Android, and iOS. Worst case, I can use this app for my next project.

If you have any thoughts about this idea, I'd love to hear from you.

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

#520

Post by robertAngst »

aswanson wrote: post #88
robertAngst wrote: post #51

Real World Embedded Systems. Built a dishwasher that cleans and sets your dinner table. C++, Arduino, Electrical Engineering, and worked with a mechanical engineer on the design execution. Here is the story, skip to the bottom if you want to see the youtube video- Started this year working on a finance App, this one needed to be perfect. React Native, Laravel PHP mysql. The app is almost finished, and is worthy of a…

Impressive. And I say that as an experienced embedded guy.

Thank you! Means a ton to me as I occasionally feel like a pretender(with my chem engineering degree).

I have tried applying to Embedded jobs but I cannot get past HR.

Guess I'm sticking with Electrical Engineering for a little longer.

Post reply on HN