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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?

#551

Post by tomcam »

mminer wrote: post #549

Unreal Engine and C++. I've long worked with Unity, but as part of a new job I'm tasked with developing our Unreal plugin. Previously I only touched C++ on occasion, so I had a lot to learn — and have a lot to learn yet — of best practices, new features available in C++11, dealing with exceptions (Unreal disables them by default), and so forth. Likewise for Unreal. Like C++ itself, it's wonderfully powerful but somet…

On the verge of choosing Unity for a project with middling performance requirements. Can you tell me which platform you'd choose if you had the luxury?

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

#552

Post by tpxl »

jtolmar wrote: post #389

* Physics Simulation - I wrote 2D physics from scratch for this game http://noisyowl.com/disks/ and the ability to actually use the implementation of the physics engine as part of how you solve design problems was absolutely worth it. If you're a programmer making a physics game, I'd recommend writing your own physics as long as you need at most one of: gravity, polygonal objects, and rotating objects. I think I migh…

>Also pgadmin is so bad, wow Pgadmin 4 is HORRIBLE. I just use pgadmin 3 when I need it.

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

#553

Post by tomcam »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #84

In 2017, I was a copy editor and epidemiologist, but in 2018 I got a great full time opportunity to learn SQL and R on the job for a hospital. I've used these skills in real analyses of social work and food shortage amongst Veterans. In 2019, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of these two technologies and to add Linux and Python beginning skills to my knowledge. I also want to understand epidemiological theory, s…

If I had a nickel for every copy editor/epidemiologist I knew...

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

#554

Post by 4thaccount »

maliker wrote: post #537
4thaccount wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'm working a bit with energy storage modeling on the transmission side and am familiar with the other topics you mentioned although everything is 10x harder with distribution as the load flows are unbalanced as I understand it. Transmission systems are gargantuan, but at least you can assume steady-state in most cases. Are you with a utility, University, national lab, or contractor?

Cool! It’s a very fun time for energy storage work. I’m part of a utility group but I mostly work with DOE and the national labs. The unbalanced phasing in distribution can make solving powerflow harder, but the big problem we face is data quality and volume in the circuit models—one substation and its feeders typically have over 10k circuit components. The detail is needed since the model is used for outages, work o…

Neat! This is indeed a great field. I wish I got to do a lot more national lab related work myself.

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

#555

Post by 4thaccount »

elbear wrote: post #157

I started learning Haskell again this year. And I finally got to work with it professionally. I'm also using PureScript in the same project, so it's really exciting. This year I also discovered R. I had to do a Python to R translation, so I got fairly familiar with R. I also discovered a few languages, but I haven't started learning them yet: red-lang and Pharo.

I've played with Pharo a bit and have started to learn Red's ancestor "Rebol". All of these technologies are pretty great. I think Red will find that niche where it is super empowering to use and still fast enough with the Red/system dialect, multicore...etc.

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

#556

Post by remilouf »

Erlang and Go.

I have a background in data science, so have a lot of experience with Python. I’d always wanted to do more backend stuff: push my models in productions, do the ETL work myself... But quickly got frustrated with Python.

Go and Erlang have solved a lot of my pain points. Erlang is a bit of a strange beast for people who come from procedural languages, but it allowed me to build ETL pipelines that are more robust than anything I could do with Python in less than half the number of lines. Even for heavy computations, I now find myself spinning Python nodes to do the heavy lifting with Pytorch and co, and doing all the orchestration with Erlang. It also made me a way better programmer.

I use Go for computation-heavy APIs that don’t require a lot of data massaging. It’s a very efficient, weirdly comforting (!) language.

Now I think I got the bug, I really want to learn Clojure and Nim this year :)

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

#557

Post by meddlepal »

PhilippGille wrote: post #424
meddlepal wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, no strong disagreement there, but it doesn't matter for most operational and infrastructure tooling where the language and ecosystem really seems to have taken off. Hell it barely matters for most web services or apps once you factor in database or other IO latency. It does have a nifty concurrency system. I do like that most Go code is idiomatic because the language really kind of restricts you to writing it a…

Go 2 will get better error handling, error types and generics: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

Interesting, thanks! But at the same time who knows how long it will be until Go 2 exists and even then the migration will be probably be longer than desired.

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

#558

Post by johndubchak »

thisisananth wrote: post #206
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…

This is so inspiring. It is also really amazing that you were able to do it in 2 months. How much time did you spend working on this? All the best!

Completely agree about the inspiration part. I can imagine the laughter between the two brothers as they watched early staged prototypes fail and water spewed out...very cool.

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

#559

Post by Drdrdrq »

bowlich wrote: post #269

Two technologies that I've had an on and off attempt to learn for the last couple years finally clicked into place this year: Ansible -- I converted my dotfiles install bash script to use Ansible and to also install all my terminal dependencies. Then I started expanding on it to include my entire development box and to provision a bunch of vagrant boxes of different Linux distros so I could test the waters with somet…

Re React: I totally missed that train but was forced to learn everything about ES6, Promises, React and Redux in one gig. Fortunately I had someone who showed me the ropes, otherwise I would have wasted lots of time. Still, I never really understood how things work until I made my own side-project. Don't give up, React is worth it!

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

#560

Post by mminer »

tomcam wrote: post #551
mminer wrote: post #549

Unreal Engine and C++. I've long worked with Unity, but as part of a new job I'm tasked with developing our Unreal plugin. Previously I only touched C++ on occasion, so I had a lot to learn — and have a lot to learn yet — of best practices, new features available in C++11, dealing with exceptions (Unreal disables them by default), and so forth. Likewise for Unreal. Like C++ itself, it's wonderfully powerful but somet…

On the verge of choosing Unity for a project with middling performance requirements. Can you tell me which platform you'd choose if you had the luxury?

Almost without question I'd choose Unity for most projects. Its rich ecosystem, large community, and decent documentation make it a solid choice. Many of its warts like only supporting an ancient version of C# have been remedied in recent releases (as of Unity 2018.3 you can write C# 7.3, which is a nice language indeed). Unreal's Blueprints are slick for gameplay scripting, but I'd choose C# over C++ for game code any day.

In the end they're both excellent engines, and I suspect a AAA game would be better served by Unreal, but I find Unity far more flexible for arbitrary game designs whereas with Unreal you sometimes feel like you're fighting its roots as an FPS engine (though if you're making an FPS, UE4 might be just what you need).

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