371–380 of 620 posts
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…
Kotlin almost feels like a rebranded Swift.
Golang, Vue, craftcms (a modern php CMS). On the non-technical front, I learned how hard interviewing is nowadays (had been decades since I interviewed for a full time job). It's brutal.
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…
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
Learned modeling for Machine Learning. Took Andrew Ng's ML course then Coursera's Deep Learning specialization. I already had a data science background, doing NLP data collection, processing, and building annotation tools (for text, images, audio, and video) at my day job (Ruby on Rails mostly). I did have to do a lot of brushing up on long-neglected math skills (Khan Academy is amazing!) and continue to do so. Also…
Picked up some Go. Still cannot for the life of me figure out why it's so popular (please don't reply with statically linked binaries)[1]. In the infrastructure and ops space it seems to be slowly eating Python (sadness). When in Rome, do as the Romans do. [1] Such a benefit doesn't matter in a containerized world.
Favorite tech and the one I'm most anticipatory about in 2019 is ARKit and how easy making AR apps has/is going to become. If you dive into it now it's clear that Apple has some big plans for AR and eventually a new computing device.
This year I learned:
- Vue.js (amazing JS framework) - F# - React/Redux - Jest - Vim (well... I should say became way more proficient) - Visual Studio which I try to avoid like the plague (I find it bulky, slow and frustrating). Thankfully a lot of their tools can be loaded through bat scripts and exe files which are independent of the IDE. That includes an excellent C# repl I can use to immediately run code as well as run C# scripts on the fly including legacy code that won't run in .NET Core. Found an ok debugger that works from outside VS but not as good as the one VS provides to be honest. - .NET core (a lot of nice things to say about this) - Azure and with a lot of mixed feelings about it.