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Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#31
This year I want to focus on transitioning to being a remote developer. Due to the corona virus I have been given the opportunity to be remote but I am finding I might as well be remote because my commute is long and most of the details I need would be better handled by email/text.

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#32
I'm taking a break from work related stuff. I'm focusing internally, build up my willpower, build up spiritually, build up my physical body. It's the year to kill bad habits and start new ones. Maybe dive into philosophy, psychology, economics, literature (i.e. cramming TV Tropes). Anything non-work.

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#34

Brushing up on some social skills. Been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I'd be curious if anyone on here has good recommendations for this area. On the tech side I'm going to try to develop my python skills a little more. Expand my DevOps knowledge in my current professional stack which will mean Azure DevOps. Perhaps spri…

> anyone on here has good recommendations for this area Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

Looks good. Added to the list. :D

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#35
post #21

Assuming you mean Phoenix Project , I highly recommend reading Goldratt's books: The Goal , It's Not Luck , and Critical Chain . They're the inspiration for Phoenix Project and cover a good bit more material. I can't say they're great novels, they're no worse than Phoenix Project with regard to their prose, but they aren't stellar either. But if you really want to see where Theory of Constraints and Critical Chain Ma…

Oops that was what I meant! Thanks for the recommendations. Do you know if there are any books that are inspired by (or squeals of a sort) to Phoenix Project ?

The author of Phoenix Project released a companion/sequel piece titled 'The Unicorn Project'. Same series of events, but from the PoV of a sr swe / tech lead.

I'd recommended reading through all or half of Pheonix and then moving to Unicorn. I found lots of value in both

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#36
My main aim is to get to grips with Reinforcement Learning. I'm using

* Stanford's CS234 class which is on youtube and has assignments at the course page [1]

* Textbook freely available from Sutton and Barto [2]

I'm hoping to use it in a project with Lean [3] to make an AI that proves theorems.

I'm intending to move to emacs (well, spacemacs) for all my non-Java text editing so I'm also investing time in that.

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs234/

[2] http://incompleteideas.net/book/RLbook2018.pdf

[3] https://leanprover.github.io/

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#38

Brushing up on some social skills. Been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I'd be curious if anyone on here has good recommendations for this area. On the tech side I'm going to try to develop my python skills a little more. Expand my DevOps knowledge in my current professional stack which will mean Azure DevOps. Perhaps spri…

How to talk to anyone was a good book. Tells you things that you can develop and put some effort on, like reading a bit of topics outside of your interests so you have higher chances of having a good question to ask.

Like say you meet someone that likes cars, if you don’t know anything about it, it’ll be hard to ask something non chitchat, but if you read a few news of motor sports, you might be able to ask something that sparks conversation.

“Cool, yeah I don’t know anything about them hehe”

Vs

“Oh I don’t know much about it but I heard that X class is really competitive, what do you think?”

Or something like that. Applies to anything really.

Re: Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

#39
post #22

For me it's the following: I want to improve my APL(Dyalog/co-dfns), Rust, and Coq skills to passible levels, i.e. being able to comfortably use them and writing code in an idiomatic style. I also want to improve my skill with SystemVerilog and VHDL. I'm decent with HDLs but I need a lot of work with regard to my testbench writing, translating specs to a TB, and using the random constraints based testing(similar to p…

> getting stuck on an idea and overlooking better alternatives Care to elaborate on this at all?

For me the issue basically boils down to getting hung up on a certain way of doing something or implementing some feature/subsystem.

An example is reinventing the wheel in a (what is in hind sight) pretty janky way of handling dependency injection because I for whatever reason was hung up on minimising dependencies. It was in C++ and within a month I had realised my mistake but the damage to the code was already done.

I should note that the overall principle of my design/decision I still think has value but it was implemented poorly due to entirely pointless self-imposed constraints.

I've gotten better about this but I still occasionally see myself getting hung up on what are ultimately pointless details and self imposed constraints.

One of the problems for me has been finding where to draw the line on my self imposed constraints since a lot of them help me write better, more maintainable code but when taken to extremes they can occasionally negatively impact my work and cause long-standing technical debt.

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