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Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply ignored the first line and appreciated the rest of the response because it had good actionable information. I wish I had older mentors in engineering and CS when I was 20-35yrs to tell me their war stories and point me to promising areas of work. This constant outrage at every perceived slight is a recent phenomenon of the Facebook/Twitter decade and it is suffocating.

Not at all, what the "30 year" commenter did is even mentioned in the HN guidelines. See the section In comments : > Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Assume good faith, and try to get the point.

"That is a question that a junior developer would ask" is not on the same level as "that is idiotic".

If you're asking after "hot new tech" it's probably because you haven't been around long enough to see how tragically wasteful the "hot new tech" treadmill is. The "30 year" comment manages to communicate that very directly.

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

#323

I am the maintainer of these roadmaps https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps if it may help. We are in the middle of updating them for 2020; frontend roadmap has been updated, backend and devops are expected to be published in the next couple of weeks. Also, one of my goals this year is to make these roadmaps interactive with clickable nodes, adding details for each and making them easier to follow for beginners.

Love this site. Very cool flow chart-ish illustrations.

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

#324

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…

It's a bit strange to me that you use profitability as your metric of success for a _side project_. Most of the shiny tech that has severe breaking changes is Javascript - there are plenty of other technologies to have fun with. The older I get the less I care about the technology choice and the more I care about the content of the project.

It's one of the metrics, but having kids and thus less time for hobby projects, the more profitable a side project, the more time I can dedicate to it (and reduce my freelance work). And thus I can use it more long-term.

With non-breaking tech, I can focus more on features and monetization instead of updates and debugging.

I still give some space for experimentation (re: frontend I'm interested in learning more about Mithril.js and Svelte), but I don't go all in and risk long-term profitability.

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

#325

I am really liking Quasar Framework for quick Vue development. It bundles a bunch of things that are annoying/confusing to new Vue devs (config hell) with a lot of niceties baked in by default: linting, hot reload, tree-shaking, etc. And it has a strong frontend UI on par with Vuetify and has good documentation.

Surprised you didn't mention having Cordova/Mobile baked in... that seems to be the biggest selling point that you can have one code-base for mobile, web, pwa, electron, spa, etc.

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

#326
What’s the community stance on Linux certifications? Taken as a granted for people to take you seriously or not so much? Does HR generally require it where you’ve worked? Etc.

Asking for myself really. I’ve been around tech and Linux/*nix since 2.4 was the new shiny, but don’t have the RHCSA/CE. Have A+/S+, BS math.

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

#327
post #247

Invest in projects that have maturity and staying power. For example, Python, Django, and Postgres offers a mature stack for web development.

Or PHP/Laravel/PG|MySQL Or Rails/PG Or Phoenix/Elixir/PG Or .Net...

There's lots of mature stacks not just django. Laravel being my choice because I find django's default admin clunky to grok and kind of ugly would rather just build my own admin or use a package that implements some basics that I can plug into. I also like laravel migrations better, feels more like rails which I started my career in. I know you can do that w/ django rest and what not, but feels like an anti pattern to have a default admin panel that nobody uses because it sucks or everybody uses but you don't want to because it's ugly, etc... Also not a fan of the way people generally handle db models. Eloquent is a beautiful thing, and Query builder is more beautiful when you need raw queries ran.

I've only seriously used Rails/Laravel in dev/production and they're so similar I can easily move back/forth and just change lang syntax. I like laravel better simply because it has a lot more built-ins that I use a lot -- like queues, notifications, auth/oauth via passport, telescope(logging), etc... Haven't used rails in awhile though maybe they've added those natively, but the new ignite plugin for logs in laravel is amazing.

All my own opinions.

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

#328
My goal for 2020 is to STOP learning new langs/frameworks/etc. Stop being focused on the process and MORE on the outcome. What i'm building. Why I'm building it. And fucking complete some shit. I have 10 SaaS's in dev at any one time and haven't shipped anything.

2020's are going to be about me shipping crap instead of starting and jumping to something else. No more wasting time.

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

#329
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…

Using Python for high-performance anything is a bad choice. You will quickly bottleneck at the code execution speed, even if it's just to query some cache.

If you don't agree, make a simple "hello world" endpoint and see how many req/sec you get. Then compare to Rust / Java / C++ / Go. It will be radically different.

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

#330
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…

Python isn't known for high performance As was said by one of the original Twitter architects, defending the choice of Ruby against people who were saying that it was at the root of all of their performance problems, for any well capitalized company, the language rarely makes a difference. A stateless web server is a “embarrassingly parallelizable”. The speed or lack there of your runtime is usually not a make or bre…

So your proposed solution is to throw more hardware at the problem? It surely can work at the small scale, but why do it when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars / mo in servers? Why not choose a proper high-performance language, at least for the parts that are slow?
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