Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#211

Post by jspaetzel » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

zbruhnke wrote: post #130

I came here to tell OP to spend the time learning something like Terraform because it is not a trend or a fad, has wide adoption by the enterprise, gets them closer to the metal in understanding how everything works and will almost definitely help them in their career. I've instead found a flame war with someone presuming a person's age and preceding to talk about how much better they are ... oh HN why does it always…

Learning terraform is probably only going to be useful if you are going into operations, joining a team small enough to not have a team dedicated for that, or if you'll occasionally be supporting others who are maintaining infra.

In addition to that... That entire ecosystem is changing rapidly and will probably be completely different in 5 years. (Terraform has only been out for 5 years)

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#212

Post by cutler » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

moksly wrote: post #21

Is it actually always a good idea to keep yourself up-to-date with the hottest tech stacks? We picked up the first angular, because of the “keep up mantra”. That turned out to be a complete waste of resources when the second version released. I’m not saying that it can’t be valuable, but these days we build 70% of our stuff with python, Django for web with a minimal amount of JS because it turned out our clients actu…

It's not just Denmark - it's a metropolis phenomenon. Here in the UK, as in most countries, once you move outside the major cities Java, C# and PHP dominate the job market. Even JS and Python roles are thin on the ground.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#213

Post by ghoshbishakh » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

tbrock wrote: post #118

erichurkman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why Django over something like rails? If you going to go for batteries included go for a Tesla battery pack and not a set of double a Duracells. I like using flask but django always felt half baked to me vs rails.

I don't know Rails. I know Django. Should I learn Rails in 2020 ? Or something else?

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#214

Post by ksec » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

sp0rk wrote: post #182

kugelblitz wrote: post #59

Sorry 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…

> Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? This line added absolutely no value to your comment (try reading your comment without the opening line and tell me it's any different) and resulted in a lot of distraction from the rest of the conversation. It's curious to me that you decided to include it even though, as indicated by the disclaimer you provide at the beginning, you knew its po…

Not OP, but I think there is a reason for it, although I do agree it might have been better phased.

Assuming Good intention, ( Which I think OP is ) sometimes it is a little hard for people under certain age to understand certain things. It is simply a reflect on our stupidity that when we were young, we too were also singing, praising and hyping all the shiny tech. And we were burnt by it.

So it was more like a suggestion to those under 30, here is what I did, I was stupid. and if you are under 30, please consider my follow experience as some sort of guidelines.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#215

Post by tracer4201 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

zinclozenge wrote: post #159

azangru wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No reason to act like this. Not the author of the parent comment; but with bristling replies like this, aren’t you dismissing the experience of those who, through years of experience, have become weary, and disillusioned, and a bit cynical? Isn't it also a valuable perspective (don't go for the new and shiny; stick with the tried and true), delivered in exactly the same way many older craftsmen have historically sh…

There are plenty of reasons to learn new languages and frameworks. Dismissing them because of 'new and shiny' is not a good reason.

The only reason to learn most of these frameworks is if your line of work has a high chance you’d inherit, need to support, and/or build new features on top of such a code base.

Otherwise, we don’t need 10 different tools for building—what is at the end of the day—a simple website or CRUD application.

Complexity isn’t a good thing. Creating complexity is the first sign of inexperienced coders.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#216

Post by Tainnor » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

oneepic wrote: post #109

quelsolaar wrote: post #57

Mathematics. Its Probably just another fad that will prove worthless next year, but I'm jumping on the band wagon for now.

IMO 1) it's already been a fad for a while, and 2) if you're talking about higher-level math (Lie superalgebras, differentiable manifolds, and other big words...) most of it has been and still seems to be impractical (read: worthless) for general programming.

Differentiable manifolds seem to lie at the core of differentiable programming which is supposed to be hot stuff in ML right now. Not sure about Lie superalgebras, but finite fields and elliptic curves are useful in cryptography, homotopy seems to find some application in type theory, category theory (or at least abstract algebra) seems useful for languages with ADTs etc.

Not saying that you need to know the theory in order to be able to use all of that (probably most people don't, or at least only the most superficial parts of it), but there are enough applications if you take a close look (and then there's all the obvious stuff: graph theory, numerical analysis, optimisation, etc.)

I would say, though, that more that the concepts themselves, it's useful to have some modest mathematical maturity, i.e. you know how to formally prove something (even if you don't use it often), you can read a paper, you can digest abstract definitions, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#217

Post by steve_adams_86 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

Dowwie wrote: post #76

Learn 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 relati…

I inherited a code base that has major issues stemming from the developers not realizing what postgres can do.

It's reliant on Kafka with a bizarrely complex queue system for answering questions from users automatically in a distributed, scalable fashion. It has schema-less messages shooting around referencing database rows and tables with zero certainty that anything will exist when the message arrives. It works, but it's a real mess and it breaks remarkably easily.

There's nothing about it that couldn't have been done more easily and perfectly scalably enough with a single database. The product will probably never be large enough to need something like Kafka.

I really, really agree with you. Better database knowledge would have put us weeks ahead on this project already, and it's still very early.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#218

Post by briajens » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

simongray wrote: post #92

moksly wrote: post #21

Is it actually always a good idea to keep yourself up-to-date with the hottest tech stacks? We picked up the first angular, because of the “keep up mantra”. That turned out to be a complete waste of resources when the second version released. I’m not saying that it can’t be valuable, but these days we build 70% of our stuff with python, Django for web with a minimal amount of JS because it turned out our clients actu…

> When I look at the job market in my region of Denmark, almost every job is for JAVA, C# or PHP. No-one is hiring for Rust, graphql, go or any of the other hipster languages / frameworks. Udviklings- og Forenklingsstyrelsen has a huge project written in Clojure, ClojureScript and R and they're hiring all the time.

Depends on what boards you look on. In the startup scene there are a lot of Go, elixir and Ruby on Rails jobs. A lot of founders, myself included are trying to get people with these new competences

Ps: I also want To find a Dane who knows vue + tailwind. Impossible to dig up so please go learn ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#219

Post by tracer4201 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #163

> +1 if you suggest something cutting edge that very less people know about! Well I would suggest learning about The Fuchsia Operating System (a new OS by Google) which is extremely cutting edge of OS Development and its kernel (Zircon) brings interesting concepts to the table in terms of design and implementation. It is bleeding edge enough that Flutter is used for the new apps, Rust is used for the drivers and the…

How is it bleeding edge? I don’t think using the latest framework or language to solve some problem makes it cutting edge. Is it more secure or introduce some brand new paradigm that an OS curriculum wouldn’t cover? Or is this cutting edge in the sense that it’s one more way to learn how to solve a problem that you could have solved in 2010, but now you have to learn these other frameworks or languages?

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#220

Post by Tainnor » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

quelsolaar wrote: post #57

Mathematics. Its Probably just another fad that will prove worthless next year, but I'm jumping on the band wagon for now.

I'm biased because I'm a mathematics student, but I really think that not enough people give maths the credit it deserves.

Here's a good blog post about this: https://j2kun.svbtle.com/programming-is-not-math-huh