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Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

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Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#1

Post by mh77 »

Due to weird circumstances I have about 10 months with secured income without having to work. When the 10 months are over I need to get a new job.

Up until now I have been working mainly with UX/IA/Design, but would like to transition more towards web and/or app development.

I should mention that on the side of my day job I have launched a few Rails apps and also iOS apps, so I am not starting completely from scratch.

Things I am considering:

* ASP.NET MVC (Where I live this is requested from a lot of companies)

* Backbone.js / AngularJS / Ember.js

* Android development

* Swift (I will most likely look into this anyway)

* Or just deepen my knowledge in Ruby/Rails.

Any feedback and ideas on what I should focus are welcome!

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#2

Post by basicallydan »

Lucky you!

If I were in your position I'd use a couple of months to do some Swift development, and a couple to do some Android development using Android Studio. Might be worth trying out something for Google Glass and/or Oculus Rift if you have the necessary hardware. Or maybe grab a programmable quadcopter and give that a go?

Don't forget to consider learning about some other disciplines too, never know where things will take you :) or are you totally set on spending your time on programming?

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#3

Post by artie_effim »

The rest of the stack. Spend some time with layers 3&4 and you won't regret it. It was the most boring class I has in school and I use it every day. Read this book: http://goo.gl/ZGifKa (Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol.1: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture (4th Edition)).

Knowing how TCP/IP works will give you an edge over other devs for understanding data movement and endear you to the IT/network/security folks (who do you favors).

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#5

Post by mh77 »

basicallydan wrote: post #2

Lucky you! If I were in your position I'd use a couple of months to do some Swift development, and a couple to do some Android development using Android Studio. Might be worth trying out something for Google Glass and/or Oculus Rift if you have the necessary hardware. Or maybe grab a programmable quadcopter and give that a go? Don't forget to consider learning about some other disciplines too, never know where things…

I will surely look into other things too.

I have found myself getting more and more into health, nutrition, yoga and meditation the last years. So the dream would be to somehow combine it.

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#6

Post by mariocarvalho »

basicallydan wrote: post #2

Lucky you! If I were in your position I'd use a couple of months to do some Swift development, and a couple to do some Android development using Android Studio. Might be worth trying out something for Google Glass and/or Oculus Rift if you have the necessary hardware. Or maybe grab a programmable quadcopter and give that a go? Don't forget to consider learning about some other disciplines too, never know where things…

I completely subscribe.

Dive into mobile world (ios and/or android) and you'll have a lot of job opportunities everywhere.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

#7

Post by basicallydan »

dennybritz wrote: post #4

No matter which one of these you choose, I'd recommend working on real (preferably open source) projects and putting them on Github so that you have something to show when you apply for jobs after 10 months.

Totally agreed! A recruiter I spoke to yesterday said, "I see that you have a presence on GitHub..." referring to one of my more popular OS projects, and then rambled on for about 15 minutes about his open source friendly client. I'm not saying you want to attract lots of rambling recruiters (because that's boring) but it means that people are recognising hard work and OS contributions as a good thing. It helps.
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