Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#11

Post by fancy_pantser » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

The next obvious step after message queues and distributing work would be streams.

Here is an excellent introduction to unified logs and stream processing by the author of Kafka at LinkedIn:

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#12

Post by lostphilosopher » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

gaze wrote: post #9

Get good at math. It'll serve you well and never go out of style.

I'd recommend statistics specifically. Comes up everywhere and it's easy to be wrong about if you don't dig into it.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#13

Post by politician » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

mfatica wrote: post #7

nmca wrote: post #5

SQL

You think a self-taught programmer might never encounter SQL?

Speaking as a technical development manager, I can say that many people have far less than adequate exposure to SQL, and that training people to use SQL effectively and safely is all too often a common requirement before letting them loose on the database.

There are so many ways people misunderstand and misuse SQL and relational databases, it's honestly staggering.

So, I second the OP. Learn SQL, and you'll stand out.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#14

Post by Robin_Message » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

Read the curriculum of an undergraduate computer science course and read up on the things you haven't heard of. Some courses will even have lecture notes available.

E.g. these four pages are the university of Cambridge masters in computer science:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1a-75.html

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1b-75.html

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part2-75.html

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part3.html

(Or a MOOC, but the links above are easy to browse text, syllabuses and lecture notes, not a load of videos.)

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#15

Post by ThrustVectoring » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

gaze wrote: post #9

Get good at math. It'll serve you well and never go out of style.

Math is a bit too broad. From personal experience, the most relevant topics for programmers are Linear Algebra and Discrete and Combinatorial Algebra.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#16

Post by m_fayer » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

https://dataintensive.net/

I can't recommend this book enough. I have a CS background, and still had quite a few "I can't believe this thing has been hiding in plain sight!" moments while reading it.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#17

Post by copperx » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #16

https://dataintensive.net/ I can't recommend this book enough. I have a CS background, and still had quite a few "I can't believe this thing has been hiding in plain sight!" moments while reading it.

I'm now torn between reading this one first or the Architecture of Enterprise Applications.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#18

Post by pernambucano » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

sesser wrote: post #3

mosalarynolife wrote: post #2

Design Patterns

What are some resources outside of gang of four?

https://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#19

Post by theossuary » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

kyllo wrote: post #6

Learning in-depth your various options for persisting data, is very useful since most applications have to deal with persistence in some form, and increasingly in a distributed manner. Go beyond simply skimming the surface of SQL vs. NoSQL and the marketing claims different databases make about their scalability and consistency. Learn what ACID and CAP stand for and the tradeoffs involved in different persistence str…

Two great resources I've been going through are

- https://dataintensive.net - Really deep dives into different types of data storage solutions, their history, and how they actually work.

- http://www.cattell.net/datastores/Datastores.pdf - Good paper that helps differentiate similar but different datastores. Really helpful when you're trying to pick a modern data solution.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#20

Post by aequitas » Mon, May 13, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks compared to normal shell scripts. The functional approach and dependency resolving of Make allows you to express them with minimal boilerplate and you get tab completion for free. Sometimes I try to take more native solutions (eg. Tox, docker) but I always end up wrapping those tools in a Makefile somewhere forthe road since there are always missing links and because Make is ubiquitous on nearly every Linux and macOS it is just all you need to get a project started.

Example: https://gitlab.com/internet-cleanup-foundation/web-security-...

Running the 'make' command in this repo will setup all requirements and then run code checks and tests. Running it again will skip the setup part unless one of the dependency files has changed (or the setup env is removed).