Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

IMHO it's a good idea to learn things at different points on the adoption curve - learning to balance "cutting edge" with "already widespread, I just haven't used it" helps in making good judgments about tool selection for projects.

Reactive component frameworks: I've been quite happy with Vue. I'm interested in learning Svelte - don't know if I would use it for production yet, but it's definitely gaining traction and has some interesting ideas. (The compiler-based approach makes a lot of sense, especially with wasm on the horizon and the desirability of cross-compiling to native mobile platforms.)

Visualization / mapping: Mapbox GL is amazing, to the point where I can't recommend Leaflet anymore; the only major hurdle is their style spec, which makes a lot more sense if you have some exposure to LISP-like languages. AFAICT d3 remains the gold standard for interactive visualization, and the micro-library approach of v4 / v5 means you can take advantage of things like webpack tree-shaking. I'd love to play around with Observable notebooks as an alternative to Jupyter.

Databases: PostgreSQL + PostGIS. If you aren't _deeply_ familiar with the many awesome features of this combo (vector tile generation via ST_AsMVT, functional indices, full-featured JSON support, transactional DDL, etc.), take the time to become familiar; there's a good reason SQL is the new NoSQL :p

Other things of personal interest, in no particular order...I'd love to learn more about HTTP/2, GraphQL, wasm, ways of organizing CSS, and ways of organizing ETL / automation pipelines. For languages, I'll usually run through tutorials every now and then to get the feel, but other than that I largely take a "just-in-time learning" approach.

Blazor. I stopped doing development work about five years ago because JavaScript seemed to be taking over everything. I absolutely hate JavaScript so I ended up making a career change to not have to deal with it anymore. Blazor (and other compile to wasm frameworks) lets you avoid 90% or more of the JavaScript nonsense that makes up modern apps.

why not something that doesn't seem to relate to your backend work at all, e.g.

Dennis Yurichev's Assembler book will take you all of 2020 to finish :-) (aka "Reverse Engineering for Beginners"): https://beginners.re/RE4B-EN.pdf (see also HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21640669)

Erlang and BEAM is incredibly cool concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FonRzASOkZE

I also really like Nim: https://nim-lang.org/

Or something totally different: learn about BGP, BGP-sec and modern alternatives, e.g.: SCION https://www.scion-architecture.net/ ...

Security Engineering is essential reading even (or especially?) if you're not working in infosec: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

Or/and look at which new RFC's might give you ideas for cool side-projects and then use the new language to come up with something -u-s-e-f-u-l- FUN to build.

> If you ask me, you shouldn’t pick up things until you need them.

It's worth learning enough to know when you need them, and when you don't (strengths and weaknesses). That's the bare minimum for me.

The next level of understanding is pretty different, either I'm seriously considering using the technology or I'm intrinsically interested in how it was built. I often dig into the latter if I think I can learn something from how it was made.

Actually Django and Bootstrap are my bread and butter too! I stick to them for anything mildly serious.