So HN, what are some cool, shiny new technologies that you worked with this past year? Care to tell us what those technologies are and why they are so cool?
Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
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Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#2I'm kind of ashamed to admit it (at the end of 2010!), but I did some Objective-C/iOS apps for the first time this year, and I was pretty amazed by how good the Apple dev tools and the iOS simulator actually are.
The other thing which impressed me is kvm, in contrast to Xen.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#3Backbone.js! Hits the sweetspot for a lightweight clientside MVC framework.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#4New to me: Numpy/Scipy. If you're using Matlab you should know there's a Free and worthy Python based alternative
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#5Erlang - playing with serious functional code for the first time in a long while has done wonders for my day-to-day Java job.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#6Redis. Fucking awesome database. Does exactly what it's advertised to do, with no unexpected surprises. Great documentation. Finally we can go beyond the simplistic key-value map/reduce datastores, for when you don't need all the guarantees that traditional SQL forces you to have.
(I still use postgres and sqlite for other database needs, but I'm strongly considering moving a few of those over to redis if I have time.)
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#7Redis. It has ton of different data structures that make it an interesting alternative to the relational DB and memcache.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#8LDAP, particularly 389 DS.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#9These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech".
1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.
2. flask: this little framwork is in my sweetspot. It does all the annoying crap of webby stuff, without all the "use our orm/routing model/way of thinking of http" so common in the space
3. mongrel2: I like it because it uses 0mq as the backend and sanely integrates some components in a way I feel could be better for many use cases than traditional stacks.
4. 0mq: This gets special mention, because it has been around for a while and I was actively using it, but 0mq 2 came out sometime this year, and is different enough from the first round, that it could be considered a separate technology. It isn't revolutionary in the MOM space, but it is a cool lightweight approach, and the core team has the type of dedication I like to see in OSS projects.
5. ABSOLUTELY NOT NEW: Haskell -- this year is the first year I've had time to sit down with Haskell for real, and start understanding the weird FP thing. This has made everything I do feel shiny and new, because even though I never actually use Haskell, I find myself writing very short hsskell programs in python and c and the other languages I use in my day job. When I started coding I remember thinking "This must be what a wizard feels like!", Haskell has brought back that feeling for me.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
#10makerbot cupcake cnc.
It was an on again off again sort of project mostly off, but i finished it up a week or two ago. Now I can print plastic in any shape i can draw in art of illusion. It's satisfying fiddling at the computer for a while then printing and having a real 3d thing.