Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

Drawing. I want to express my ideas though drawing. I want my drawings to be beautiful. I work as a civil engineer.

TCP/IP and the very basics of computing - Basically I want to understand deep down how everything functions. I also want to learn about blockchain just so I can improve my arguements and identify flaw's with more precision.

I've been working on this, too (admittedly... for years)! I similarly have a 'very direct' style of communication. I've received formal feedback on more than one occasion calling me 'abrasive'.

fwiw, two books helped me massively in this area:

1. The Field Guide to Human Error. This book I read on a whim just because I thought it would be useful for software development. The first few chapter's ended up being kind of life altering. It felt like along personal attack on my character. In short, it was about perspectives we take when dealing with other people, and how viewing from our vantage point is not only frequently wrong, but it's lazy.

Even with things like CR comments. I now ask myself "_why_ do they think that's the right approach?"

2. Never Split the Difference. While it's about negotiations, it deals a lot with how humans think, and despite what we tell ourselves or want to believe about we being rational creatures, emotion dominates almost all interactions. It gives all kinds of useful advice for framing conversations and using language which avoids being confrontational or accusatory.

This was another huge one for me, as it shifted just about all of my conversations from starting with "you're dumb and here's why" to "let's make sure we agree on what the problem is" and then making finding the solution a collaborative effort, rather than a top down directive.

Probability theory with Jaynes.

Computer org and design (risc-v) with Patterson

Digital signal processing

Event streaming/multiple views into your data based on whatever the listeners care about. It sounds nice, but it's a lot different than the usual CRUD apps I'm used to. Still wrapping my head around when it's best used, how to generate the event (do you just generate the event, or do you save to a db and then use CDC to emit the event) etc.

Think of Facebook. You create a post and see it on your wall right away. The rest of the world doesn't need to see it right away, but you should or else you think the post wasn't saved. Does that post get saved in some db/cache specific for you, and _then_ an event is emitted?

But yes, I'm learning things like that.