Just build things and you're gonna learn many technologies along the way
Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
71–80 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#72Mathematics. Its Probably just another fad that will prove worthless next year, but I'm jumping on the band wagon for now.
Just for the sake of learning math or are you targeting something?
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#73I'm currently experimenting with Futhark. It's a ML-style functional language that targets the GPU. It has nice Python/NumPy bindings so it's pretty easy to offload some computations.
There's also accelerate although that sort of ties you into the Haskell world.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#74Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…
Actually Django and Bootstrap are my bread and butter too! I stick to them for anything mildly serious.
Same here; even throwaways get built on Django. It's just so quick and easy to test something out. And if you're lucky and it does need to scale… Django can scale just fine for the vast majority of things.
It Just Works™ and the Django group is not trying to steer Django into something that it's not. Same with Flask.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#75I'm learning about Dgraph and the variant of GraphQL it uses as a query language.
Triple stores have always been useful in niche applications, but the scaling capabilities and ergonomics of Dgraph could make it more broadly appealing.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#76Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL. Not knowing of their capabilities may lead you to unnecessarily complicating your tech stack. You can go a really long way with just this domain of expertise. From there, do the same with whatever key-value store interests you (for me, it's Redis). Python isn't known for high performance but when a django web app uses a cache and relational database effectively, it can achieve a very acceptable peformance. Case in point: the Zulip chat platform: zulipchat.com.
Aside from the database domain, I really enjoy using Rust and recommend it as the next language for anyone to learn, but only after taking time for in-depth relational database training. :).
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#77I would say if you have an appetite for learning something new, then pick something which nicely complements your existing knowledge and broaden your horizon.
For example, if you are a Java/C# corporate developer then maybe learn something different like Go, Rust or go for a complete paradigm shift and look at a functional language which will teach you complete new things and change your overall thinking of software development.
If you have been mostly doing backend why not learn a frontend language? Just pick one which you like the most from your initial gut feeling, don't overthink it.
If you've worked with a lot of dynamically typed or interpreted languages, then pick one which is statically typed and maybe compiled.
Basically, just learn something truly new, which will most certainly teach you something regardless if you will continue doing it for a long time or not.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#78I think a lot of the world hasn't heard of Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) but could make good use of it.
It's a sensible configuration language with types. And the Haskell integration is quite good.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#79Learning what's new and shiny is great, but try to spend time this year building something, seeing it live in the wild, fixing and debugging it, nurturing it. Build on your critical thinking. Perhaps do that with a new technology :)
This is a good point.
I would suggest the same, building something and let it pass out to the public or contributing to the existing projects that might be using the stack that you want to work with.
You learn a lot when you share your own work to others. Good life lessons or maybe career lessons are often learned when sharing something.
Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?
#80Webassembly, React Native