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

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

#231

Post by AlchemistCamp » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

K0SM0S wrote: post #6

If you're in the web sector, definitely give a try to wasm. Have a go at Rust while you're at it — see what I did there? I'm personally hot for GraphQL because it's a powerful paradigm to model data. Both Go and Rust are incredibly interesting languages, in very different ways. In some ideal world, Go fits in a scaling/efficiency vertical somewhere in-between C and C++ (it's very specific but it basically encompasses…

Rust was one I listed in my answer, too. I built a simple roguelike game in it last month and had a fantastic learning experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKpDNnfiId0

Unfortunately, the end product isn't very easy to integrate with WASM, but I'm going to keep in mind the possibility from the start next time.

Rust's extra bonus for me is that it can be used to make natively invoked functions that can be used in Erlang/Elixir code with zero risk of taking down the whole VM (which can be done with C).

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

#232

Post by james_s_tayler » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:51 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…

It's very next on my list for 2020!!! I already started off doing a Pluralsight course on it late last year. It has fast become part of my happy stack. I've tried a bit of Cloudformation and I just have no appetite for it in comparison.

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

#233

Post by ksec » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #146

elicash wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a condescending response. Yes, this person is a student. No reason to act like this.

I don't agree the response is condescending. FOMO is a thing, as well as buzzword-driven development and CV-driven development, and it's pervasiveness generates this false sense of urgency regarding learning new frameworks or technologies, and even creates this false notion that this rat race is a basic requirement to have a career as a software developer. If anything, this sort of comment is not repeated enough.

Cant upvote this enough. Especially in Web Development, how many Front end framework hype cycle has there been now, 10?

But then again I have to admit CV Driven Development is quite important for Careers development.

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

#234

Post by sircastor » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

parsd wrote: post #100

Learn everything about vanilla JavaScript really well. Just vanilla.

I think this is really valuable. More than any popular framework, knowing how JavaScript works at its root will give you a huge advantage in any JS pursuit.

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

#235

Post by Random_ernest » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #224

Random_ernest wrote: post #28

I know that this might be not a very popular opinion but I am learning Clojure in 2020. I work a lot with data and in my particular job the most important things are rapid prototyping, productivity and level of abstraction. After getting into the basics I find it to be the most intuitive and well designed language I came across. Last time I felt that I could do extremely complex things in hardly any time was when I l…

I really love Clojure. I dug deep on it for a while and got pretty good at it. But I haven't used it in years. The trouble with Clojure is it's very hard, bordering on impossible, to get it going in a work environment. It's very difficult to justify the cost at the management level. It's also very difficult to build a grass roots movement amongst coworkers because the harsh reality of lisp languages is you pretty muc…

> The trouble with Clojure is it's very hard, bordering on impossible, to get it going in a work environment.

Really? I guess things changed but I had 0 trouble setting it up recently.

> reality of lisp languages is you pretty much need some kind of "paredit-like" capability in your editor to not go insane

Every major Editor like VSCode, Atom, Vim, Emacs has this.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 6:56 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…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by carapace » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

mrosett wrote: post #135

carapace wrote: post #64

In a word: biotech. Okay, yeah, that's a bit beyond the scope of your question... Tech-wise I think the stealth silver-bullet will be "Categorical" programming†. When this hits it might even contract the job market for programmers. Compiling to categories" Conal Elliott http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/ † As in a kind of PL paradigm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm

I realize it may have been an offhand answer, but what do you have in mind? Go get a graduate level understanding of biochemistry? Start working with genomic data? Etc.

What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

The Information Revolution has only just begun. ;-D

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

#238

Post by jophde » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #167

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #152

One good thing about the hiring process in Amazon is/was that the "hottest tech stacks" in a candidate CV received zero brownie points. I's amazing how many candidates would fail on basic reasoning skill, programming, OS internals, security.

> basic reasoning skill you mean people who haven't done 2 months of leetcode before the interview ? Amazon interview is one of the easiest to hack with some patience and basic tips and tricks off of leetcode. Def don't need to know "os internals". Just go to discussion forum on leetocde, tons of ppl who got into amazaon doing this. Example: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/360829/ama... Don't kid yo…

Well the sad truth is grinding Leetcode is much more likely to get you a job at big company where you will make 2x as much and work 1/2 as much as startup. You are right. The only thing that matters is how well you do on the LC like interview. If you do poorly but pass you get deleveled no matter how much experience you have. If you do well because you practiced the same question the night before you just massively increased your salary and rank because obviously you are senior.

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

#239

Post by crimsonalucard » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

pezh0re wrote: post #194

crimsonalucard wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this something to learn? It's more of something to try. Anyone who can write code can write tests and anyone who can write tests can writes tests before they code. It's trivial. Instead learn formal methods. Learn how to prove your code correct for all cases rather then verifying your code for one test case. This is learning and it won't be rehashing what you know like tdd. Formal methods is brutally hard.

The concept is easy to grasp, but for me the challenge is figuring out which testing framework/suite is best for the language I'm dealing with (and then learning the intricacies of how the tooling works).

There's millions of frameworks out there. I don't think it's worth learning the details of those things. It's like learning one persons very specific way of folding clothes. If you want to use one go for it, but to use one for learning? Waste of time.

You don't need a framework to do TDD. Can't you put your assertions and functions and tests in some iterative loop?

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

#240

Post by decasia » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #133

For context, I’m 45, but was an “expert beginner” staying at one company for over a decade before I took my career seriously a little over a decade ago. I also don’t live on the west coast where both salaries and the cost of living are both far beyond normal. My experience from being in the job market frequently, watching trends, talking to people in the industry locally and recruiters, is that it doesn’t take more t…

I agree deeply that "where are you trying to go professionally?" is the required context for any sound answer to the original post.

As it happens, I'm in my 30s and trying to shift from "programming is a good job" to "having an actual career in software," so I really appreciated your thoughts about how to make that shift. Thanks!